1 seeds at Detroit champs

All divisions at Detroit have finished and not a single first seeded alliance will be playing on Einstein. Only two 1 seeds were finalists.

Why is this? Is it because of the game or something else? Is it just random chance? Why is Detroit different from Houston, where 1 alliances were successful.

Is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing?

Why is this so much different from the norm at regionals, where one seeds have historically dominated?

Relevant:

Discuss.

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A climber and a lucky schedule can propel you to first. Doesnt mean that bot can be the best of their division, even if it gets paired with the best one in the division. Defense will also bring down any alliance if played right.

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The middle of the pack is a lot stronger at North than south champs.

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In Tesla, not only did Alliance 8 knock Alliance 1 on their butts, but all Blue Alliances took out Red Alliances, in straight matches in 3 of 4 QFs.

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It’s also pretty evident that year-to-year Houston has more “powerhouse” teams, whereas Detroit has a much stronger “middle-class” of teams. The Houston powerhouses get first seed, then push through to win their division. In Detroit the top “middle-class” teams are more evenly matched so upsets are more likely.

I’m sure this year Detroit also was shaken up by the fact that an insane number of top teams were on one division (Curie). That meant instead of each division having one or two powerhouse teams who are more likely to win from the 1st alliance, Curie got a bloodbath and the other divisions had “middle-class” teams battling it out.

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I think this is for two main reasons.

  1. The rocket RP is obviously critical to ranking high. Thus, the best teams in the world built robots which could solo rockets. However, because of the strength of defense, the rocket RP could easily be denied. This is the first year in the bonus RP era where even mediocre defense could deny ranking points. Because the best teams are constantly defended, I think a lot of the best scoring robots were unable to rank high due to the constant defense they were under denying rockets.

  2. Again, defense is so strong in this game. Lower seeds could pick up excellent defense robots, which were arguably just as valuable as high scoring first picks. By the time the draft came back around to 1, many of the best defenders would be gone.

As to why this wasn’t seen in Houston, I think the mid-low seeds at Houston simply didn’t have the firepower to win, even if they did have great defenders.

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I think being able to solo a rocket was still rare enough that a climber and a lucky schedule isn’t enough to get you to the top.

Also many of the first seeds seemed like they had the two best teams in the division.

I think this is true, but it would be interesting to have it confirmed by ELO analysis.

The more interesting question is why. I think it might be because a greater proportion of North teams come from areas that have had districts for a few years.

Detroit Qual average:

22% doesnt sound that rare

22% means a team without the ability to fill the rocket will average less than 2 rocket RP over the course of the competition. I would estimate that based on that statistic your probability of getting randomly assigned a team that can complete the rocket is 15%. So using a Bernoulli distribution it seems unlikely that getting a lucky schedule can boost you to the top of the rankings.

I wasn’t thrilled about Destination Deep Space at Kickoff as I was about other games in the past. I heard it called “Destination Deep Sleep”.

As the season progressed and the game evolved, I started to see how ingenious the Game Design Committee (GDC) was in the various scoring aspects of the game.
This has become more apparent at the CMP’s.

Hatches only worth two points with cargo at three seemed paltry at first, but the fact that you needed the lower point one to score the higher point one…
Ranking points in qualifications accrued for activities during the match (Rocket) and the endgame created tradeoffs for trying to complete a Rocket vs. climbing to Hab 2 or Hab 3.

In Playoffs (yes, Playoffs, not Elims), the lack of the Ranking points was not as a significant issue as was the availability of cargo locations. Watching Robots prioritize hatching the rockets to create more cargo locations was great from a strategy standpoint.

Now, add the increased significance of defense in this year’s game and you have a game theory that has so many aspects (wheels, weight, maneuverability, visibility from the driver station, swerve, driver skill…)

I haven’t done an analysis of “norm” at Regionals this year, the number of teams at an event vs. winning alliance seeds, though I suspect that there may be a relationship with a deeper field that suggests that the more teams, the less chance there is of the #1 alliance being the winning alliance.

At the CMP’s, teams have experienced a whole season as the game developed and learned how to better play the game.

As far as the CMP’s. Winner/Finalist
Houston: 3/5 1/2 1/6 1/7 2/4 1/6. average1.5/5 Not so much.
Detroit: 5/6 2/1 4/2 3/1 2/4 6/8. average. 3.7/3.7. Yay!

So, yes, the distribution of the Einstein teams at Detroit is significant and wonderful.

IMO, this is one of the best game designs. Thank You GDC.

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This is probably the most accurate post I’ve seen of the entire season.

Imagine how qualifications and rankings would have changed if the second RP was sandstorm based instead of the rocket. Higher level teams would have likely seeded higher consistently and defense in qualifications would have sunk a great team a lot less.

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Hate to call you out but 346 atleast definitely expected to be there and we definitely used our extensive scouting data to make good picks.

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Sorry my bad, I thought 548 was your second pick for some reason. In that case, yeah, you guys did pretty well.

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Yes getting the 2nd and 4th best cycling robots on our field was a surprise. Alliance selection at champs is always interesting, this year there were a lots of weird things that went on.

It worked out great for us, we eyed getting to the 8th seed, with the depth of the field we knew a Einstein worthy alliance could be made. It was a pleasure to work with 1577 / 3324 / 4338, facing a great alliance and some strategy changes that didn’t work out got to us in the finals. Proud of the work our whole team put in this weekend.

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In the vast majority of matches there is virtually no strategy compared to other games. In most matches teams don’t have any sort of dynamic defense which means teams will be doing basically the same thing from match to match. Basically the only strategy that exists is looking at your cycle times and based on that deciding when to switch to cargo and when to go do the endgame which is a type of strategy that has existed in every recent game.

If this game lacks something in strategy, it certainly makes up for it (at least at the high level) with its incredibly fast-paced gameplay. Power Up had a good depth of strategy, and robots could be very fast, but most matches became utterly uninteresting after the first 30 seconds.

I remember this game being criticized at kickoff as one of the least interesting to watch, but of all games that I’ve watched (2016 onward), Destination: Deep Space is easily the most interesting as a spectator imo.

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Yeah definitely. At a high level the gameplay is fast enough that it will keep you invested which would have made it a good spectator game had it not been for the horrible camera angles and gigantic field elements.

What an incredibly awful and ignorant thing to just volunteer out into the void.

I say this as someone who went on the record many times saying whoever won Tesla would end up going 0-fer in the Round Robin. Was really surprise how 346 ended up being able to pull off a very on-brand CHS alliance in that it got to poach great teams from a favorably low position in the draft, and end up with a better overall alliance than a number of others.

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The most on-brand CHS thing that 346 did was get two ties on Einstein.

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