Thoughts on CoOpertition

[Leav]

After an amazing season, I'd like to share some thoughts and points from a discussion we had on our team regarding coopertition.

Premise:

• Coopertition resulted in an unforeseen outcome, ubiquitously known as 6v0.
• The 6v0 strategy is undesirable (i.e. many people, teams and we believe FIRST itself would like to avoid such a strategy)
• Having taken out a patent on the idea, FIRST is unlikely to revert to the win-lose-tie system.

What coopertition sets out to do:

• in concise terms: avoid un-sportsmanlike blowout matches by combining cooperation with the competition.

The problems:

• the 2010 implementation of coopertition to seeding points resulted in teams being rewarded for scoring self goals.
• A quick fix (the +5 to the winning alliance) mitigated the problem but did not eliminated it.

Possible solutions:

1. revert back to win-lose-tie. this is a competition and let's not try to paint it as anything else.
2. penalize self goals. this will eliminate the problem for breakaway, and a similar rule could be adopted for the 2011 game, depending on it's scoring system.

However:

1. choosing this will obviously bring back to the field the possibility of blowout matches.
2. this will also lead to rewarding blowout matches, with the possibility of no defense being played in order to help maximize the opponent's score.

In summary, some ideas FIRST introduced are simply perfect (alliance selection procedure and elimination match order, for example) but some are simply very flawed: coopertition is a nice idea, but applying it to a game like breakaway simply guts the core game mechanic.

In order to involve coopertition a game would have to be designed with it in mind, and not just slap on the seeding score system.

here are some ideas:

1. for breakaway: teams get the same hanging score which is minimum(red hanged robots, blue hanged robots). this would mean it's in the best interest of both teams to have hangs and would virtually eliminate the need for finale-protection. (interesting for having "defend the goal while allowing to hang" scnerios).
2. for 2011: some sort of huge red hocky puck in a blue-robot-only zone, and a blue one in a red-robot-only zone. teams must give the hocky puck to the opposing alliance, which must each score it in their respective zones. points are awarded if both teams scored the puck.

Your thoughts?
-Leav