Week 1 Impressions of Rack 'N Roll

[platypus]

Originally Posted by Noah Kleinberg

To the people who think autonomous mode isn't very important this year, don't think of it as two points, scoring is exponential. especially if more than one robot on your alliance scores during autonomous, you're at a pretty big advantage for the human control part of the match.

I have to respectfully disagree here. You've made the general statement that I imagine most justifies autonomous, but at the same time, you've missed the point that I've tried to make.

Yes, autonomous is a good thing to have -- after all, it does score points, and when is scoring points a bad thing. The point that I have tried to make is that it doesn't score enough points to be worth the effort that most teams would have to put into it.

It's a difficult autonomous to code for, and most autonomous modes are not 100% successful, with this year being no different. The reality is that autonomous integration has a serious opportunity cost for all but the most efficient teams, and an unrealiable chance to score an extra ringer (since spoilers aren't used, that's what it is) was hard for most teams to justify when they were being delayed by typical mechanical setbacks and even atypical mechanical setbacks (think Banebots). Even the software teams have better things to do, like program a particularly complex control system.

As a good yardstick for the value of autonomous, compare this year to last year. Last year, the team that won autonomous won the game at least 75% of the time, and that's a conservative estimate. There isn't much data to make similar estimates this year because of the lack of autonomous scoring, but I can say from observation that it really didn't make much difference. Maybe in the national eliminations, alliances will score 3 in a row in automonous and it will matter, but realistically, the GSR eliminations sported an alliance that once scored two keepers, only to lose to the steamroller of the top alliance. Last year, if two teams on an opposing alliance had unloaded their clip of nerf balls for 40+ points + 10 more points for winning autonomous, it would have taken an act of god to beat them (or at least a DQ from one of them for placing a robot part into the side goal).

Autonomous is always nice, but it isn't worth what it needs to be worth this year.