Alliance Captain versus last pick in Alliance Selection

[Ben Martin]

1B and 2B. I'd always rather have the win. With proper marketing, a win can be used as a tool to strengthen your team's relationship with schools, local businesses, and your community. Plus, this situation probably means I am playing with teams more experienced than mine--which by my experience learning from them is far more useful for team development/growth than being a captain.

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by Ben Martin

1B and 2B. I'd always rather have the win. With proper marketing, a win can be used as a tool to strengthen your team's relationship with schools, local businesses, and your community. Plus, this situation probably means I am playing with teams more experienced than mine--which by my experience learning from them is far more useful for team development/growth than being a captain.

And if you're getting picked at an event of any kind of size (most regionals in the southeast are well over 50 teams, sometimes over 60), it means you weren't junk to begin with. So: this.

Sincerely,

Alliance 1's last pick
Alliance 1's last pick
Alliance 2's backup
Alliance 2's last pick

[pabeekm]

I would think it varies by person, team, and year based on what one’s capabilities and reasons for wanting to win are. If you want to win to prove that you can build a truly excellent machine, then that makes sense and you’d be more inclined to answer the A's. If you don’t believe you can dominate but want experience being around the teams who do, then that makes sense, too, and you’d probably rather pick the B's.

How beneficial either option can be for a given team depends on what they recognize as their biggest areas for growth. As long as a team is willing to use their end result, be it failure or success, and milk it for every opportunity it presents to improve their program, then they are clearly doing it right. Sometimes improving means testing your formula by trying to dominate, sometimes it means doing everything you can to be around the teams who have got it down; it just depends on where you feel your program is at right now.

This is coming from someone on a team who has been going for B's in order to get to champs and experience as much as possible, but may be finally ready to aim to dominate because of what being there has taught us.

[Monochron]

I predict if the first question didn't involve you qualifying for Champs there would be a big difference.

[Marcow]

Originally Posted by Monochron

I predict if the first question didn't involve you qualifying for Champs there would be a big difference.

I agree with this. In general, I'd love to be the number x seed at an event. Usually, that means you did something right with your team in the design\strategy department and I'd consider that a success. However, I think everyone would love to stamp their ticket to cmp. The time between your last event and cmp can be used to improve as well. And as Ben mentioned earlier in the thread, winning regardless of your final qual rank has its perks as well.

For these reasons, I went with 1b and 2a but I also understand the somewhat of a paradox that creates. So I'll assume that after the regional event the team sat down and brainstormed some improvements knowing they had their CMP tickets punched and figured something out that ends up being successful.

[halowaffle47]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

For me, it's not about winning a blue banner. It's about the experience my students have at the event. And frankly, I just think it's a better experience to be an alliance captain, formulate your alliance according to your scouting information, and providing the leadership the alliance needs to be successful. Being a first pick for another alliance gives you some of this as well, as it can then be a join decision for the second pick. Whether we win or lose doesn't really matter.

I totally agree. FIRST isn't about winning, though winning is a nice intensive, FIRST is about learning and about the experience. I would rather my team tried its hardest and failed and learn from that, then any thing else. Besides if you have accomplished everything what else is there to look up to. If you have a dream, make that dream you life. Everyone's dream should be to be the best they can be and to learn the most they can learn. So if they're best isn't THE best of everyone they can accept it and stop trying or they can try even harder for the next match or the next competition or the next season. But I'm just one person. But if 10 or 100 or 1000 or even 100,000 people don't care about winning but instead care about the reasons of FIRST we WILL change the game and how people see it.

[John Retkowski]

I think it greatly depends on the regional, but in a good amount of instances I don't believe the last pick of the first alliance contributes nearly as much as the first two robots. That being said, being essentially the 4th best robot at the competition (yeah I know it doesn't actually work like that) would make me feel a lot better than being handed a gold medal instead of earning one. of course it doesn't feel very good losing in the quarterfinals either.

Championships on the other hand has a much bigger and better field to choose from. If you want to win world champs that third robot is very crucial just like the second bot.
Originally I was going to put 1a and 2a but after more thought I went with 1a and 2b

[Lil' Lavery]

I'll take excellence over success in any scenario. Granted, being an alliance captain does not automatically translate into excellence, and more often than not all the teams playing in the eliminations at CMP are excellent.

I also think this would be more interesting if you switched the 24th pick to the 25th in the second scenario. Would people rather win a Championship when not playing a match in the eliminations than being a division alliance captain?

[Joe G.]

For me, 1A and 2A, without a doubt. I have had a few experiences being dragged to high placement as the last pick (and one being carried by excellent partners as an unworthy captain), with lousy, dysfunctional robots. They weren't fun, but they developed a very strong ability to gauge success through metrics other than final placement. To me, placing as a captain or early pick that doesn't make it far almost always represents a greater accomplishment for a team than a 3rd robot, even a well-done, role-player 3rd robot.

The "B" options are interesting because, while mid-range alliances that get eliminated quickly tend to be forgotten by the greater community, everyone in the community can point to several "golden examples" of picture-perfect 3rd robots, which were extremely simple to build, did their job perfectly, and had a major impact on their alliances. 1503 in 2011. 4334 in 2012. 148 in 2008 (calling this one "simple," or a good example of low resource design kinda baffles me, but a lot of people do so and it works with my point, so I'll include it). That pure ramp bot that won your local regional in 2007. And so on. And it's very easy, and in many ways completely correct, for a team to look at these success stories, decide "we should do that!", and build a robot which explicitly targets this 3rd robot position. Especially if part of what a team is after is greater recognition in the community.

The problem with this mentality is twofold. First, contrary to popular belief, it's actually really hard, and I would argue not always fully possible, to be an ideal 3rd robot through designing to be a role player, or at least to spend a season with the intent of being an ideal 3rd robot. Building a sophisticated robot capable of being a contender is hard in some very real, obvious ways. It takes a lot of engineering skill to design effectively. It takes a lot of money to put together. It takes a lot of time to assemble it, program it, and practice with it enough to get the most out of it. Building a robot like 4334, on the other hand, is hard in a very different way. It's hard to do in-depth enough game analysis to be reasonably confident in your decision to depart from the "expected" strategy. It's hard to have the guts to intentionally design a robot that will probably not win a regional, and depend on other means to get to the world championship to play the role it was meant for. It's hard to convince stubborn people to abandon the "exciting" parts of the game. It's hard to judge where to draw the line between strategic flexibility, and unneeded features which take away from the core objective. It's hard to define simplicity, to judge exactly how simple a given mechanism will be, and determine whether or not a means of adding percieved simplicity is going to make your life more difficult in the long run, or paint yourself into a corner (My team messed up bigtime on this one this year). It's hard to design a robot, even a very simple one, that radically departs from the "stock" design from the past game this year's game follows closely, from Ri3D and other prototypes emerging, especially when success at 2B essentially depends on near-flawless execution. It's hard to convince teams that your little robot is the best possible partner for them, especially if your chosen strategy really doesn't play out very much during qualifying matches.

And it's very hard to pick out the winning, genuinely useful support roles from those that just don't work out. Some examples of robots I have seen from each of the past few years, where the team behind them probably truly believed they were building "the next 4334" at the time:

• 2015: Pure canburgling robots, with well made, robust, well-engineered systems, which were too integral to the design to be upgraded enough to be competitive with elite or even semi-elite "swinging post" style canburglers. 2015 was an especially bad year for this, as at high levels of play, 3rd partners were either entirely cheesecaked creations with none of the initial design goals/intent present in the finished product, or 2nd tier human loaders with the exact same strategic goals and design elements as their slightly faster captains. Rigid specialization just didn't work out for anybody this year, and it won't necessarily work out in future years. This is another wrinkle in the difficulty of the design process for one of these robots -- teams may single-mindedly seek out a strategy that fits this mold, when an effective one really doesn't entirely exist.
• 2014: Pure goalie robots designed to man the goalie zone in teleop, with either no ball manipulation at all, or only as a total afterthought. Robots centered around catching.
• 2013: In most cases, otherwise immobile pure 30 point climbers. This one doesn't quite fit as well, since I think most of the teams who did this primarily under performed due to underestimating the difficulty of the 30 point climb, instead of strategic error. I also saw a "feeder station" robot, designed to emulate the human loader station and ferry disks down-field to their partners, which ended up just slowing things down. It didn't work out well.
• 2012: This year, most of the side/specialist objectives were actually highly worthwhile if performed with high quality execution, one of the reasons that 2012's probably my favorite game of all time. Still, I ended up seeing a lot of robots that perceived certain specialty tasks (bridge tipping and facilitating triple balances, mostly), as being much more difficult and involved than they were, and developed huge systems that encompassed their entire robot to achieve these things with authority, when in the end, almost negligible additions to otherwise fully featured robots like passive wedges or stingers ended up outperforming these dedicated designs. This is yet another area where teams going for this kind of strategy need to be extremely careful: If you zero in on a task and devote your robot to it, it's very easy to allow the design freedoms that this gives you to cause your design to spiral out of control, or skip straight past the easiest solutions because of the perceived difficulty of the task, when simple passive additions can often be the very fastest or most reliable way of accomplishing a task. Again, look at teams who centered their entire robots around canburgling, vs. those who used dead-simple auxiliary systems. Which ones were winning races?

Ultimately, while I think that it's extremely important for teams to build within their means and be realistic with their design goals, designing explicitly to be a specialty-role 3rd robot can actually be a much bigger risk with less payoff than building a mid-level robot with very conventional objectives. I admire the teams that do this and succeed greatly, but I also think that there's some of the "monkeys at typewriters" effect in play: there's an element of luck in identifying subtle, alternative strategies or nuanced specialty roles in a game that has never been played before, and with enough FIRST teams working away at the problem, there will be some bad solutions, some good solutions, and the occasional great solution. Of course, the more skilled, insightful, and dedicated you are, and the more you work at it, the greater your chance of being one of the "great solutions." But I think that it's misleading to describe this approach as safe, or low risk.

Additionally, back to the question of "which type of robot represents "success," or team growth, better?", I'd point to the history of the classic examples of B-type teams in the years after their B-type year. I can't think of any teams that consistently target, and nail, this type of strategy and role year after year. It seems like most of them either float around this approach for years, and are very hit-and-miss during this time, or move on to more conventional designs, and may ultimately reach positions as alliance captains, but not necessarily immediately. 4334 built a full court shooter which missed elims at their first regional, then a pretty conventional 2014 robot (albiet with a revolutionary stupid-simple strategic innovation which permanently altered the game dynamics). 148 built upon their 2008 season to become one of FIRST's biggest powerhouses, but nobody would call their designs these days "simple." And so on. It's clear that the teams who have walked this path see growth beyond being the 3rd robot as a valuable thing for their program, even if there's a period where they don't get quite as many blue banners.

[chrisfl]

Being an alliance captain and being a last pick also depends on the game. For a game like this year, it was physically impossible to beat the 1st or 2nd placed alliances(it just wasn't fun). In a game like this you would want to a last pick. However, in a game like last year where anything could happen, I wouldn't mind taking my chances as an alliance captain. For instance, our team's robot wasn't able to pick up a ball and had mecanum wheels, we got picked by the 7th placed alliance captain and due to good planning and driving skills we won the competition. Also on the case of anything can happen, that year our team managed to become 2nd place alliance captain and got out in the finals, just an example of how anything can happen. In a game like this year, I would much rather be a pick than a captain

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by chrisfl

Being an alliance captain and being a last pick also depends on the game. For a game like this year, it was physically impossible to beat the 1st or 2nd placed alliances(it just wasn't fun). In a game like this you would want to a last pick. However, in a game like last year where anything could happen, I wouldn't mind taking my chances as an alliance captain. For instance, our team's robot wasn't able to pick up a ball and had mecanum wheels, we got picked by the 7th placed alliance captain and due to good planning and driving skills we won the competition. Also on the case of anything can happen, that year our team managed to become 2nd place alliance captain and got out in the finals, just an example of how anything can happen. In a game like this year, I would much rather be a pick than a captain

I wish.....

[Lil' Lavery]

Joe G's post is awesome, even if slightly walking away from the original question (as is to be expected). I agree with it almost 100%.

Originally Posted by Joe G.

The "B" options are interesting because, while mid-range alliances that get eliminated quickly tend to be forgotten by the greater community, everyone in the community can point to several "golden examples" of picture-perfect 3rd robots, which were extremely simple to build, did their job perfectly, and had a major impact on their alliances. 1503 in 2011. 4334 in 2012. 148 in 2008 (calling this one "simple," or a good example of low resource design kinda baffles me, but a lot of people do so and it works with my point, so I'll include it). That pure ramp bot that won your local regional in 2007. And so on. And it's very easy, and in many ways completely correct, for a team to look at these success stories, decide "we should do that!", and build a robot which explicitly targets this 3rd robot position. Especially if part of what a team is after is greater recognition in the community.

A lot of this is confirmation bias in play. For every really successful "3rd robot" the community can name, numerous others that failed to reach eliminations or were bounced early are forgotten. Many simply aren't the same quality as the "golden examples," and many more simply didn't have the good fortune of ending up on the right alliance.

Originally Posted by Joe G.

4334 built a full court shooter which missed elims at their first regional, then a pretty conventional 2014 robot (albiet with a revolutionary stupid-simple strategic innovation which permanently altered the game dynamics).

There were other teams that used the "bounceback pass" before 4334. Maybe not always a literal bounce off their catapult, but the tactic was quite popular during the qualification matches at MAR championship, and had a few incidents before that.

Originally Posted by Joe G.

148 built upon their 2008 season to become one of FIRST's biggest powerhouses, but nobody would call their designs these days "simple."

I wouldn't even call their 2008 robot "simple." The swerve drive they built is already beyond the capability of most teams, let alone packing it all into such a tiny package.

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

I wouldn't even call their 2008 robot "simple." The swerve drive they built is already beyond the capability of most teams, let alone packing it all into such a tiny package.

I wouldn't remotely consider it simple either, and yet I'm constantly hearing it described as such, and lumped in with some of the more classical examples.

(I could write a whole white-paper on gross misuse of the word "simplicity," often retroactively, within the FIRST community).

[Ginger Power]

Interestingly in my two years as a student on 4607 we were the 23rd pick at a regional of 62 teams in 2013, and the number 2 alliance captain at the Minnesota State Championship in 2014. In 2013 we won the Northstar Regional as that low functioning 3rd robot, and in 2014 lost in the finals at the State Championship. So I've more or less lived the scenario and can speak to how both felt, and the impact both had on 4607.

So in terms of impact on the team and team growth following an event, there is no better thing than winning. Following our 2013 regional win, our community hopped on the bandwagon and hasn't hopped off yet. People who were rooting against us stopped. Sponsors who had already given, gave even more so we could attend the world championship. Not only did winning bolster our community support. It also gave us the ultimate oppurtunity to improve our robot at champs. We didn't really make waves at champs as a rookie team, and 3rd robot, I think we seeded 76th. However, the improvements we made there to our team and robot put us in the perfect position to win the 2013 MN State Championship (again as a 3rd robot).

On the flip side the community reaction to our losing the state championship in 2014 was more subdued. Granted getting second place at State is still going to be celebrated (I would imagine losing in the quarters of a regional would be a much harder sell). Losing the regional, even as a captain, doesn't allow for the team growth that inevitably happens at champs. As much as most of us hate the championsplit, FIRST's reasoning behind it (that Champs is a life changing experience) has validity. It is a life changing event.

With all of that being said, I'm more proud of my team's accomplishment as an alliance captain. When people ask me about my greatest accomplishments in life, the first item on the list, so far, is leading 4607 to that alliance captain role.

TL;DR in terms of team growth and community impact (making it loud), I'll choose winning everytime, regardless of our robot's contribution. In terms of personal feelings of accomplishment I'll choose captain status every time.

[Ryan Dognaux]

I chose 1A and 2B.

If we're the last pick at a regional event, I'm still happy, but I would still think we didn't do a very good job at that event. At least that's what I would think in my head.

If we're the last pick in our division at the championship event, we were picked over 40+ teams and I'd still feel great about it.

I think it comes down to the number of teams and the competitiveness of an event for me.