paper: 2010 OPR: Week 1 and 2 Regionals

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by The Lucas

So why use a statistic that assumes that everyone is trying to play defence all match if defence isn't necessarily sound strategy.
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Can they change zones? Are they quick and manoeuvrable? Good driving instincts? Can they clear ball out of the zone? There arent statistics for these.

Keep in mind that your best defensive bots could be playing striker and scoring all through the quals. Defence and striker are very similar roles. Unless the defender is completely shutting the striker down, I'd pick the striker over the defender to play defence.
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Actually, I hadn't thought about the first sentence at all. After some thought, I agree and also wonder if this is an indicator of how tough a schedule is? Yet coopertition points also somewhat take this into account since they're the un-penalized scores of the opposition (yet they're skewed since the winner receives double the loser).

The second sentence-- was my point in the 'fine print', and next reply. The only statistics for these are what the scouts collect while watching matches.

The third sentence -- that's a good point and it's actually what we were picked to do in DC. We were one of probably 7 bots that could score from midfield in autonomous, so we were asked to play defense for elims with the first move being to kick away the first 3 balls. We got the shutout we were looking for in QF1, still played good enough defense even with technical difficulties of a gimp drive train in QF2, held midfield scorers and a pusher bot to only 3 points in SF1, and yellow card aside held the offense to only 2 points for SF2 (valve went bad mid-match, thus putting a kicker out of the frame boundary for the remainder of the match). Up until elims, we hadn't played defense in a single match.