Does CD affect alliance selections?

[XaulZan11]

Originally Posted by smurfgirl

Ultimately, it is robot performance etc. that makes teams decide on alliance partners- what you see at a given competition is what affects your choices.

I agree that teams pick based on the other teams performance at the competition. My point is saying that how we percieve a team, or about thier performace, is affected by our preconceptions (what is said here, history of team...). So, unless a team makes selections based on only objective data, these preconceptions may play a major role.

Also, these are not concious things that people are always thinking about and aware of. In the study of the speaker, the listeners did not conciously think, 'well, I'm not sure if this is good, but I'll give him the benifit of the doubt and say this expert is good'. They asked the subjects to guess how tall the speaker was and those who were told he was an expert guessed that he was 2 inches taller than the group that thought he was just a grad student. I doubt they conciously thought that. This is why no one says, 'well, I heard on CD that their good so thier preformance today was just a fluke'.

[David Brinza]

I think the "smoke and mirrors" from CD posts clears up by Friday afternoon.

Scouts try to get some insight into teams from across the country from CD. There are other tools (like the rankings and stats from Karthik and SamSofa330) that help scouts develop a better picture of the teams' capabilities. The fact that those tools are posted on CD makes browsing these threads even more worthwhile.

[AndyB]

I DO think that CD affects team's images and I do think that it helps in most cases.

For instance, I never really looked at 1646's robot, I didn't really know anyone on the team, and I had never really played a match with them. But when I saw they were in our division this year, they struck me as a team I should match, solely because Kyle Love is with them and he is an active CD member...

There are MANY other circumstances like this that I have run across, this is one that came to mind.

Of course, I try not to allow it to affect the list I make for alliance selections, but I'm sure it does happen a little.

[Danny McC]

From CD I tell the people on my team which bots to pay most attention to. But I think that solely picking someone because of what they say they can do on CD or because you are buddy-buddy with them on CD may hurt you in the end. Also, if when we get there they see bots doing well we look to pick them. But about your question, I believe that CD does have SOME effect on the pickings.

[Akash Rastogi]

Originally Posted by Danny McC

From CD I tell the people on my team which bots to pay most attention to. But I think that solely picking someone because of what they say they can do on CD or because you are buddy-buddy with them on CD may hurt you in the end. Also, if when we get there they see bots doing well we look to pick them. But about your question, I believe that CD does have SOME effect on the pickings.

Unless you are really just in it for the fun of it. If there's a team that truly, and I mean truly, does not care about winning and just wants to have fun with their best-friend-team and picks them then I really don't see the harm in that.

+.02

[ttldomination]

People become more aware about the bots and strategies on Chief Delphi. So it can go both ways.

Teams that have a solid strategies, will only gain information about other robots and that may help them make much better decisions. But the decision isn't affected much.

But if a team changes it's strategy due to something they see on Chief Delphi, then the teams that they pick may change depending on how different the two strategies are.

[fredliu168]

I prefer to refer to this as marketting, because I'm weak at psychology.

CD allows teams to showcase their robot and their teams. When regionals or divisions come around, the teams well known on CD will probably be the first to get scouted. During alliance selections, the representative, if given a scouting sheet with no statistics, is more likely to go with a team he or she knows.

Therefore yes, I do think it affects alliance selections, great point.

[thefro526]

I've done the alliance pickings for my team this year and I will say that some of my decisions are influenced by the people on the teams. Like in NJ we picked 708 because the guys on their team were rally cool and would do whatever we needed them too. I've never been in a situation, up until now, where I've actually known people from CD and competed with their team. I know at the Championship this may come into play where a team who I know from CD and another team will be ranked similarly in terms of statistics. If I know people on one team and no one on the other I would be more likely to pick the team who I know because in theory we would work better together but the opposite is also true. If I know you from CD and you're jerky or whatever (very few people like that on here) and I would find it hard to work with you then I would pick the team who I don't know.

[galewind]

I see Chief Delphi as the "Wikipedia" of bot info -- it's a great place to get some surface knowledge, but you need to dig deeper to get the real nitty-gritty. Thankfully, couple CD with The Blue Alliance and SOAP108, and you've got a great opportunity to back up the talk with some actual research. Watch teams compete, check out their stats -- who they were with and against, etc.

What it all boils down to, however, is that all that info should only be used in an initial glance -- you have to see how the teams stack up against the teams currently at the event, and I don't mean by rankings. There are always a few teams that slip under the radar that perform exceptionally well but don't pull out the best records because they were consistently against powerhouses.

[Wayne C.]

CD is a rumor mill. A few facts, lots of opinions and lots of regional bias. Better to gather your own information by efficient scouting and think for yourself. You will be much more satisfied with the outcome.

WC

[Nawaid Ladak]

i go to another website like chiefdelphi (same vBulletin forum setup)and they call the affects caused by their forums the SD effect so i thought i should name this the SD affect.

i remember we did this once in 2005, we picked 343 at the Florida regional, just because we had fun with them the year before at the palmetto regional.

fyi: that website is www.SlickDeals.net ... now you guys know where the SD came from.