Poor team scouting methods?

[platypus]

As a former scouting lead and general strategy guru, I can speak to this.

In my experience, objective evidence is king. Subjective information, regardless of the source, is riddled with issues. My reasons for avoiding subjective information:

1. Scouts form biases early and often. The number of times I've looked over the objective data and realized that my thoughts or someone else's are inconsistent with the data is astounding, and it's often due to the fact that a scout will see a team do well early and then over-credit that team for later alliance successes. The same concept works in the reverse (over-crediting teams that strike scouts as bad with later alliance failures), but to a lesser extent.

2. Opinions differ scout to scout. Everyone is rubbed differently by what they see in a robot. Period. Anything that is debatable as to whether the robot in question is at fault or another robot will have multiple opinions. Whose opinion do you trust? Any of them? None of them? What makes one scout more trustworthy than another? How do you determine any that objectively? See my point?

3. Some scouts are smarter/more experienced than others. Hence, point #2. Good luck determining how much intelligence/experience helps an individual scout - it differs from person to person.


Ultimately, subjective scouting often gives you more issues than helpful feedback. Sometimes you'll get lucky with it, but most of the time, these issues will bias your data and taint your results. Don't risk it.

Thus, I reiterate what has been said in favor of objective scouting. Go by the numbers. Crunch them in excel Friday night. If you can, set up a software database to do it for you, but if your team lacks the resources to put all of its scouts on laptops (very few teams can), then take the data on paper and enter it into the database on one laptop.