What happened in Curie???

[sdcantrell56]

Originally Posted by ehcualp

I'm not going to go in the ranking of the robots picked. I would rant on for a whole page on how bad half the decisions were...

Besides the quality of the robots, if anyone else noticed, only 6 of the robots were 4 digit number teams. 18 teams were either double or triple digits. No rookies were picked, 2 2000 teams were picked, and 4 1000 teams were picked. It seemed that the captains didn't even look at younger teams. Experience is no excuse. Some of young teams that were not picked won regionals, or made it to the finals at their regional. These teams obviously know what it takes to win something, and have just as much experience in this game as a lot of veteran teams. And not mention, older teams are replaced every 4 years. Mentors are the only thing to remain a constant in any team, for the most part. A lot of the young teams that made it to championships have mentors that have been on teams before. In this sense, these teams have the same experience as veterans.

I'm disappointed in what Curie turned into. I would hope that it will change for next year, but I doubt it will change at all.

What rookie teams would you suggest should have been picked? As far as I am concerned, the alliance selection seemed very well done. Obviously there were a couple teams left that I thought could have been strong second picks, but overall I was very happy with all of the alliances. If a captain is picking there alliance based off of rankings alone, they will lose. Especially at the championship when you only play 7 matches, your ranking will be very driven by your alliance pairings in qualifications. I know we were ranked 36, but were top 3 or 4 in opr and that was even with 2 matches we had in which one robot either did not show up or was disabled the entire match, thus drawing constant defense from 2 robots in those matches.

Scouting is what wins regionals and championships, and all of the truly top teams have not achieved the success they have without very careful statistical scouting of every team. Although our alliance ended up losing in the quarterfinals, and we definitely had our chances to win the matches, I feel that the winning alliance out of Curie was incredibly strong and I was proud to have them representing our division.

I do completely agree that something needs to be changed about the game and how a purely defensive robot or even worse a no show team can end up as an alliance captain. Of course if there is a robot so incredibly awesome at defense then they should seed very high but the idea of a team that is not particularly good at anything can seed in the top 8 is wrong. This year, 247 was one of those teams that were just so incredibly good at pinning other robots that you just had to be impressed and I thought that that was an incredible pick for the 217/68 alliance, as 68 definitely was able to score more with another robot setting pins for them.
There also needs to be some type of filler line or something for no show teams, as particularly this year, having a non functioning robot or a no show was essentially a death sentence. Perhaps what needs to be done is to cut down the number of teams at the Championship event. I feel that too many teams have the opportunity to buy in without actually demonstrating that they can win. With less teams at the event, FIRST could increase the number of qualification matches resulting in less of an influence from luck. Maybe instead of so many teams buying in, FIRST should add an award at regionals for the highest scoring or best performing robot.

Obviously these ideas are not completely refined, but I think there is a serious flaw in the system when teams that do not run for multiple matches are becoming alliance captains, and there are still no shows at the championship event.

As with any sport, the championship should be the absolute best teams competing. I dont think we really saw truly exciting matches until the elimination matches at the championship.