One of the problems that has occured with the 2v2, random pairings in Qualifying Matches is that some teams get tough pairings and other teams get advantageous pairings. This affects the overall tournement outcome, even for teams that are not directly affected by these particular pairings.
In other words, if you get paired with tough pairings and advantageous pairings equally, but someone else gets only advantageous pairings, you have to perform at a higher level in order to maintain the same ranking.
What if the tournament structure continued as is (2v2, 4 random teams selected for each match, what teams are in a match are announced in advance) however the alliance pairings were determined at match time based on current rankings.
The highest seed is allied with the lowest seed (call this the blue alliance) and the middle seeds are paired with each other (call this the red alliance).
This concept would guarantee that the eight best teams floated to the top.
In 2000 I believe (yes I was around) FIRST used to do something similar to that. It gave you the match list with 4 teams in a match, but you didnt know who your partner was until you got to staging. Once all 4 teams were there (or as many that showed up) they told who was partnered with who, based on an automated selection. Even that would also work. In 2001, you really couldn’t use that system. In 2002 and 2003 they flat out told you your partner before hand.
Also, like DJ said, with Andrew’s method you wont know your partner until match time. This makes things more interesting, and in my opinion, more exciting. How you know your partner for evey match at the start of the competition makes coming up with strategies way to easy. With the older method, it required teams to come up with quick strategies in less than 2 min. It required more skill at being able to think quickly.
This pairing sounds interesting… I’d like to see it make a comeback for next season’s competitions. Matches would be very unpredictible… can anyone say… scouting nightmare?
I agree that it sounds fun and I would like to see this come into play in the future. It probably wouldn"t be that difficult to scout because if there was a simple rule that would always be used to determine what the pairings would be out of the 3 you could be paired with, you could guess fairly easily which team you would be with. This vagueness would also make it much more fun for scouts as well, because they would have to think up 3 strategies for each match. If you think about it, the 6 week build is a nightmare too, but that"s what makes it fun
I love challenges, eh?
Sounds like a good idea to me. The rankings would have to be locked maybe 3 matches beforehand in order to give the teams a chance to get to the proper side of the staging area and collaborate with ally, etc.
At nationals in 2002, we were ranked #1 for our division for most of qualifications. This was in part because we had one great ally after another, all who could score enormous amounts of balls quickly. With this new system, we wouldn’t have had the good allies time after time, while other teams were never fortunate enough to get any good ally.
That becomes a problem at smaller regionals. I know from the SBPLI regional, of about 35 teams…there are sometimes up to 10 robots that don’t really work. So thats how a lot of really good robots end up seedling low, because of bad partners and facing 2 working robots.
Yeah, I might be a trouble maker, but look at it this way: FIRST isn’t about making everything even for everyone since it would remove the fun and competitiveness of it (as Dean said.) This ‘new’ system would take away the real life aspects of the game such as that you won’t be able to win every time and there won’t be a god like figure that would automatically pair you with alliance partner that is the same using formulas. FIRST is about replicating situations that you might face in real life, if your an engineer or not.
*Originally posted by Rob Colatutto *
**That becomes a problem at smaller regionals. I know from the SBPLI regional, of about 35 teams…there are sometimes up to 10 robots that don’t really work. So thats how a lot of really good robots end up seedling low, because of bad partners and facing 2 working robots. **
At SBPLI many of those really good teams ranked low were also those that weren’t really working. Rage, arguably one of the best teams there, was broken for a good portion of Friday, as were many other good teams.
The point of this system is to try to even out the number of good and bad partners. If you’re highly ranked and you get paired with a team that isn’t working, chances are you’ll drop in the rankings. So most likely next time you’ll be paired with the middle ranked team. If the partner is working then they have a good chance of moving up, if not you’ll move down further and next round you’ll probably be paired with the highest ranked team and thus you should have a good chance of scoring well and moving up. The cycle would continue like that throughout the competition so the advantages and disadvantages would balance each other out. In the current system you could very likely get paired with the lowest ranked partner every time and you’d get screwed even worse. Or you could get paired with the highest ranked every time and you’d be ranked artificially high.
Eh, even though this is an attempt to make things “more fair,” it would not limit competitiveness in my mind, rather it would level out the discrepancies of “evenness” among everyone without the consequences of more limiting methods.
About this making the best teams always have to play along side the worst teams…I think that"s a great idea, because doesn"t their status as one of the “best” teams show that they are more readily able to handle a problem like an inoperative alliance partner? As a member on a team last year that was paired a couple of times with a team that was immobile yet still one, I really don’t like being stuck with a broken team, yet it was still fun and it made the matches for the broken team fun too because even though their robot didn"t work, they still got some success as a very tangible award for their hard work. This year I was on a different team that was one of those teams that didn’t move (well, we moved about 5’ average in each of our matches [and yes, that was generally a straight line]). We were initially buoyed up in the standings by our placements with good teams (we still did a bit in the match where most of our points came from, but we couldn"t have one with another robot like ourselves as a partner) but in the end we fell back as the leaders were shown and we were very logically not picked as an alliance member.
Synopsis (for those of you who couldn"t understand my rambling or chose not to read it) This system would more evenly spread the joy of a competition around the teams and it would not prevent the good teams from showing their worth as a partner (because when looking for people to choose as alliance members, scouts will know that the rankings do not tell all [which would also be helpful for those of us teams who may have 5|<1ll2 but aren"t that good at seeding highly]).
(Also, you wouldn"t be that pressed for time to think up strategies, because after everyone scheduled for your next match had finished their previous match, you four wouldn"t exchange spots, you would merely have other teams moving around you in the rankings. And JosephM, it seems KenL disagrees at least somewhat too, so don"t feel too alone.)
*Originally posted by pauluffel *
**About this making the best teams always have to play along side the worst teams…I think that"s a great idea, because doesn"t their status as one of the “best” teams show that they are more readily able to handle a problem like an inoperative alliance partner?) **
Personally, I disagree with that point 100%. I know from personal experience that “good” teams aren’t necessarily prepared to go it alone. At Nats in 2002 and 2003, my team was seeded #2 in our respective division. We did it not because we were a do-it-all team that could go out and win matches singlehandedly, but because we were great strategists and team players. When paired with any decent team, we could go out and rack up respectable scores, and the few times we got really good alliances, we’d go out and clean up the match. However, both times, we were hurt and missed out on the #1 seed because we were stuck with an inoperable partner in one of our last matches of the day. While a team that could do it all alone, like, say, 71 in 2002, might be able to survive continuous matchups with broken bots, teams like mine would be hurt because we did well as part of an alliance, not just our team going it alone. This idea is intriguing, but I just don’t think it’s a good idea. Better randomization of match pairings is the only way to truly give a fair experience.
I don’t know if I agree with the particulars of the proposal but I think that it would be worth giving some thought to how do you seed teams more effectively.
There are many many cases where teams that do not belong on top end up highly ranked due to lucky partners, lucky opponents or whatever.
I don’t have a good answer, but I think it is worth thinking about.
Part of me feels that there is a lot of information in peoples heads about teams.
Is there some way we could allow teams to rate their opponents and their partners performance during the last round and then use this information to help guide the seeding process?
I know there could be a lot of problems with this, but perhaps we could devise a system that could deal with this situation.
I know from personal experience that “good” teams aren’t necessarily prepared to go it alone.
I think you missed the point. Only in rare circumstances would a team have to “go it alone.” And that circumstance is no different than the random chance that you have to “go it alone” right now.
Consider the case where the number 1 and 2 teams come up against the number 39 and 40 teams. 1+2 versus 39+40 will usually end in a blow out and an uninteresting match. 1 and 2 will become more ensconced in the rankings, while 39 and 40 will be lodged at the bottom more firmly.
However, 1+40 versus 2+39 should be an interesting match. It should be more fun for all concerned. A competitive match is more fun to play and gives you a better feeling at the end than a blow out.
The case that many of the nay-sayers are articulating is when 1, 2, 3, and 40 occur. Then, 1+40 will have a tough time against 2+3. They would rather have 1+2 go against 3+40.
I know from the SBPLI regional, of about 35 teams…there are sometimes up to 10 robots that don’t really work.
This is a whole different problem. However, if everyone does their scouting, if you are one out of 24 working robots, you should get picked for elims and the qualifying rounds are really not important.
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