Coopertition Award.

[=Martin=Taylor=]

Something is very wrong with this award.

The spirit of the award is to celebrate coopertition by helping your opponents to compete. But in reality it celebrates the highest seeded team.

FIRST rules state:

Coopertition™ Award
The Coopertition™ Award celebrates the team that best demonstrates the ability to help their opponents compete. In the inaugural year of the Coopertition Award, the award will be granted to the team that earns the most Coopertition Bonus points during the competition.

Out of 24 regionals, the 1st seed team won the award 15 times, 2nd seed 6 times, 3rd seed once, and only two teams NOT in the top three won it.

Are the top seeded teams the most cooperitive? Often yes, but I'd imagine a few lower seeding teams to win an award for cooperition as well.

Don't get me wrong, seeding 1st is a huge achievement. But this award should have nothing to do with where you seed.

Something is wrong here.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by =Martin=Taylor=

Something is very wrong with this award.

The spirit of the award is to celebrate coopertition by helping your opponents to compete. But in reality it celebrates the highest seeded team.

Something is wrong here.

Considering that scoring for your opponents when you win is the least cooperative thing to do, this award has always puzzled me. It's the most selfish choice, by far, when you could be helping your opponents a lot more by running up your own score.

[ATannahill]

*This post contains my speculations and no official input from game designers.*

The coopertition award and the new seeding system encourages close matches and not blow outs. Sounds similar to G14 from last year.

I think the GDC wants the game to be more exciting and cause emotions to rise with a fast pace close scoring match.

We didn't like G14 last year, so the GDC decided to encourage near tie matches with a new seeding system and an award.

This will help bring in more people to the event and get them hooked but it will make the game/event harder to win.

[IndySam]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Considering that scoring for your opponents when you win is the least cooperative thing to do, this award has always puzzled me. It's the most selfish choice, by far, when you could be helping your opponents a lot more by running up your own score.

Exactly, I think FIRST really missed the bar with this one.

[McVey]

I'm from team 339, we won the Coopertition Award at the Washtington DC regional and were ranked 3rd seed at the time of alliance selection. I guess that one team in your list of statistics is us? Haha, awesome.

In any case, I do agree that this award is somewhat off the mark. Coopertition points play an enormous role in the final seating of the teams, having a lot of them tends to equate with being high up on the list - sort of unnecessary. But hey, I guess the six weeks of regional competitions isn't over yet, we'll soon have much more full statistics.

[ratdude747]

to me, this award was a bad idea. to earn it, one must cut points... just like what athletes do in illegal gambling. is this what we want to be teaching people to do? i do not think so.

[rwood359]

Originally Posted by ratdude747

to me, this award was a bad idea. to earn it, one must cut points... just like what athletes do in illegal gambling. is this what we want to be teaching people to do? i do not think so.

That is a GROSS overstatement. We played every game to win without any concern for this award. In the end we were number 1 seed (using either the new or old rankings). The award just came along with the performance of our opponents.

[McVey]

Originally Posted by rwood359

That is a GROSS overstatement. We played every game to win without any concern for this award. In the end we were number 1 seed (using either the new or old rankings). The award just came along with the performance of our opponents.

Yes, it actually came as a surprise to my team, none of us knew it existed. I'd say teams intentionally going out of their way to get the award is an overstatement - teams intentionally going out of their way to get the coopertition bonus to raise themselves up in the rankings, well, that's another story that I definitely saw at the regional events I attended.

[Tom Line]

Actually - look at this a different way.

The teams that manage to convince their alliance to play the LEAST defense tend to win this award. Which is to say, the alliances who play the most offense and let their opponents play the most offense will get this award.

I'm trying to read the GDC's mind here - I THINK this was meant to encourage very little defense. However, I can gaurantee you that our team did nothing exceptional to earn it: we played all out offense and usually convinced our alliance to do the same. So I have to agree - the award doesn't make much sense.

[TPNigl]

Our team also just won this award at the Boston Regional. We had no intent to win the award, but yes, we were the 1st seeded team. It's an odd award to say the least. There should be an award for 1st seeded teams, but this is not the award to do so.

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by rwood359

That is a GROSS overstatement. We played every game to win without any concern for this award. In the end we were number 1 seed (using either the new or old rankings). The award just came along with the performance of our opponents.

Us, too. We had no notion of trying to win any Coopertition award, and indeed we were only vaguely aware that this award existed. Indeed, we had no notion of doing anything other than winning each and every match we played, be it close or a blowout. We never scored a ball for our opponents, and neither did any of our alliance partners.

[Aren Siekmeier]

A mentor of ours basically summed it up as "You have a good robot and you understand the seeding system." 1986, 71, and 171, the top 3 seeds at North Star, all scored on their opponents at some point in the Qualifications, because they usually were able to sustain 6-8 point leads. And perhaps these are award-worthy characteristics...

Also, at Kickoff they mentioned making the scoring system easily understood by the audience. They did that, but at the same time little of the audience understood the seeding system or, as a result, the strategy of some teams.

If anything, I think it allows the better to put themselves ahead in the seeding by a larger margin. Once a good team gets ahead in a match, they can increase their seeding score even more by scoring on themselves.

[Bill_B]

Coopertition (doncha just luv word fabrications?) happens all over the arena - pits, field, stands, even the necessary room (thanks, RAGE?) BUT the only(?) place it can be scored is in a match. Soooooooooo, you're trying to recognize and encourage this mindset of helpfulness, what can you do? Can't give points for every bolt tightened by another team or code assistance given that clears up a tricky Labview knot, can you?

What we're seeing this year is the attempt to reward helpful behavior as progenitor of an exciting competition by cooperation. IMHO, of course. I'd like to see something more like the safety tokens for cooperation as at least one of the components of this award, but, Hey, it's early yet. Does anyone think we're done inventing FIRST?

[Josh Drake]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

Us, too. We had no notion of trying to win any Coopertition award, and indeed we were only vaguely aware that this award existed. Indeed, we had no notion of doing anything other than winning each and every match we played, be it close or a blowout. We never scored a ball for our opponents, and neither did any of our alliance partners.

Dito. We were shocked when the award was given out. We had forgotten about it. I'm glad 1772 was able to share in the award with us since we tied.