I was wonder if anyone had any advice on how to advertise your team if you are trying to get chosen by an alliance captain. I have found that no matter how you approach them the conversation is always awkward. Thanks in advance guys.
Don’t advertise in person. Advertise by showing your robot’s full capabilities on the field.
My advice is don’t. Let alliance captains do their thing. Imo talking about your alliance with them would just get annoying.
Thanks, but when we get constant horrible match ups how are we suppose to advertise ourselves any better?
Perform to the best of your ability. You gotta learn to play the hand you’re dealt. If your robot does well, scouting will pick up the rest. There’s more to picking a robot than it’s win-loss record.
Alright thanks for the advice guys. We will take your advice.
Winning in quals isn’t everything. Good teams, regardless of whether you win or lose in quals, will scout your robot based on your individual performance. You can only advertise to a certain extent, otherwise your just get annoying as other people mentioned on this thread.
Yes I have the same question, at our 2nd competition we got matched up twice with a “no show” and malfunctioning robot. We racked up 50-60 points with one RP on our own on both matches and lost to 90+ points against us.
The time to “advertise” your self and talk about your robot capabilities is on Thursday or Friday when teams are coming around doing pit scouting/benchmarking.
Having 1 or 2 people in the pits who know all of the robots capabilities and what to tell other teams on Thursday and Friday designated as “spokespeople” can help. These 1 or 2 people being the only people talking to other teams can insure that all information is conveyed as well as the information being conveyed is consistent.
Really the only people who will be talking to other teams about alliances is the potential captian or a strong first pick. Let the potential captian approach you if you are looking at being a 2nd pick, don’t approach them.
If you perform above average and are consistent, you will almost always get picked, regardless of how many matches you won or lost
Sorry guys if I am coming off as ignorant it is just our team has just gotten unlucky and ended up in the “no-man’s zone” 7-12th too many times and I’m trying to find a way for us to escape this reoccurring predicament.
I think about the only time it would make sense is if your robot was broken most of Friday, but you finally got some killer 2nd pick system working 100% Saturday morning. Just thinking back to our 2007 GLR debacle where we had a double lift that was busted all Friday till we w welded together the gearboxes that night. Then it worked flawlessly Saturday morning 3 matches in a row. Double lifting basically guaranteed a win with decent defense or scoring, but we still dropped all the way to 1st seed 2nd pick, because most teams stopped scouting on Friday, or has already nixed us. 1114 nabbed us thanks to really on the ball scouting. We probably could’ve made things less nervous by approaching a few of the top seeds and briefly explaining the problem and the fix.
I don’t think there’s a function this year that’s nearly that important. Not one that you’d rely on and base a pick on without seeing it work most of Friday.
This. Just remember, at the Central Valley Regional in 2014, 1st seed 254 picked 973 and 2135, who were ranked 43rd and 41st, for their alliance, and won the regional. There were only 45 teams there.
TBH greybots are usually a pretty safe pick no matter what.
7th means you’re picking, means you’d better be scouting and have a pick list. 8th seeds don’t often take home trophies, but 7ths have, and if you just make it to the finals you can always pick up a wildcard.
Has anyone successfully found a method for getting out of the no man’s zone??
One piece of advise that hasn’t been given yet, is to build relationships with teams long before they are ever in position to pick you. It’s probably the least important reason to build relationships with other teams but having friends on the teams doing the picking just means they already know you and what your team is capable of. Go to off-season events, do group demonstrations, have team socials, etc.
I’m going to touch a bit more on advertising, our team has an excellent example of it.
At the 2014 Lake Superior regional that 2052 competed in, our team was going to get picked by the 2nd ranked team 3018. After they said they would pick us obviously we started to talk about what our alliance’s second pick should be in the pits, then Team 3692 approached us and told us they had a bot that could load excellently from the HP and that our bot could pick up the ball right from their holder. We went to their pit to analyze their bot and decided we would pick them for their useful capabilities compared to other potential 2nd picks we were looking at. We ended up picking them and winning the regional… and we absolutely would not have won it without them. If they hadn’t advertised to us, it would of been highly unlikely we would of picked them.
But these cases to me are usually pretty rare, but to summarize my message do advertise if needed, but don’t go overboard as I previously said.
Something worth noting is that our team recently ended first place in qualifications (similar result week 2) and such we had a ton of teams come up to us and say stuff like “our last Match was a small issue we got resolved” and random crap like that to get us to pick them. We literally threw all of that information in the garbage. Don’t bother.
Since I’m a CSA my personal preference is teams that are really nice, gracious, and respectful (and fun) towards me but in the end we know what we want and we have collected enough data to know how your robot will satisfy our requirements (until we break our chain on the encoder in the first match and miscalibrate it going into the second, making a nearly unstoppable alliance get beaten by a rather rude and ungracious 8th seed alliance. Ugh)
Just be good, be nice, and don’t break.
Also don’t ever get stuck In a defense. That’s a huge no-no.
So i am getting mixed messages here am I suppose to do a little advertising or none at all?