What surprised you or learned from the first day of champs?
My biggest take is “Let them play the matches”, this could be one of the most competitive events ever, so many elite or top tier teams ended losing or are not currently at the top.
6 Likes
I found it very interesting (but not surprising) that seemingly the only fields with the favorites expected to see 1 are Newton and Galileo. Some of the fields are gonna have wild alliance selections 
4 Likes
I knew that the rankings would be inaccurate at displaying performance but I could never expect them to be this bad. Hope they change cargo rp at off-season comps.
14 Likes
Yeah, their decision not to change the RP thresholds has made the luck of the schedule super important and eliminated any margin for error.
With this being the most competitive championship in years, it leads to a lot of weird rankings that don’t quite feel reliably indicative of the best robots in the division. It’s a shame, since I was pretty hyped to see what happens when this game is played by the best of the best of the best on Einstein, and the way rankings are turning out, I think the ranks and alliance selection process are going to prevent that.
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I think there will be a whole lot of,
“Team X graciously declines.” come alliance selections.
27 Likes
One thing I’m curious about is what the heated internal debate (with regard to increasing the RP) that Frank Merrick mentioned in his AMA was about. Anyone have any counterpoints for increasing the RP?
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I’ve no data to back this up, but I feel people are attributing a little too much to the ease of the extra ranking point. We haven’t had fewer than 8 divisions for the entire world in 8 years; it’s harder for the elites to rise to the top when they play each other more, and I think we’ve kinda forgotten this.
I’d totally be interested to see what happens to the rankings if someone took the existing scores and simulated different RP cutoffs. They may improve, but I suspect not as much as people imagined (with the obvious caveat that this isn’t a perfect simulation, as teams may have made different in-match decisions with a different threshold).
12 Likes
In previous years, RPs were precious ways to improve your rank and it was possible to offset a bad match schedule with the bonus RPs to hold your rank.
This year RPs are precious for an opposite reason. Loosing one or two bonus RPs along the way along with a loss or two drops you way down the ranking and it is very difficult to claw your way back up since everyone above you is getting every available RP.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow to see how all this shakes out. It will be interesting to see if the top tier teams that have been knocked down the ranking will percolate back to the top and whether one bad match or the luck of match schedules will take a few of the current top ranked teams down the order. Alliance selection will be interesting, for sure.
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I can’t recall a Champs where the RP requirement was changed from the season, it is always mentioned as an option but never done. Given that this year was the one were it made the most sense I don’t think we will see this done in the future
1 Like
It happened in 2016 and it improved the game at the championship level.
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Match schedules matter, in a field where most of the teams can be expected to contribute at least 30 points, getting on an alliance with a few lower scoring robots or having a bad performance can really screw up your ability to rank.
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didn’t the number of pre placed gears change in 2017, effectively raising the amount needed for 4 rotors?
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Chill. There are a lot of quals still to be played.
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Scout. You’re likely to need a deep pick list.
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Play your game. Get balls, toss them in the buckets, repeat until time to climb the monkey bars. This game is beautiful.
30 Likes
The only argument I can think of (and not a particularly good one) is one people were saying earlier in the season as a reason to not raise it - “it’s not fair that it was value Y for earlier events if it is value Z for later events”. I don’t think this argument really holds water between separate, independent events but it’s the only one I’ve seen and can think of.
Perhaps FIRST would rather Champs be less predictable this year with flatter RP structure and leave it up to the chance of Matchmaker?
Reminds me of 2012, when the single 2 RP bonus for co-op balancing was similarly close to a must-have every match. Aside from all the other drama that champs produced, I think it’s probably fair to say that we didn’t get the strongest possible alliances in many places. Considering how much the competitive bar has been raised since then and how deep the field are, I wonder whether it augurs even more dramatic divisional playoffs this year than we’re used to seeing.
I will revisit this later (when rankings + OPRs have finalized, data isn’t super stable right now), but I ran a script that checked the new rankings vs the OPR rankings, and calculated a score for agreement between the two (lower is better, just sum total of # of incorrect places).
15, 6102
16, 6108
17, 6084
18, 5972
19, 5906
20, 5874
21, 5844
22, 5778
23, 5752
24, 5736
25, 5746
26, 5746
27, 5724
28, 5618 * 2nd best
29, 5628
30, 5644
31, 5644
32, 5628
33, 5616 * best
34, 5668
35, 5648
36, 5750
37, 5768
38, 5778
39, 5840
40, 5858
It seems clear, even with this early, bad data, that ~30 cargo would have been a better number.
Yeah, I thought they would be better - but I’m curious as to what the actual top 10s will be like after Friday. My gut says they’ll still be bad, but my gut certainly isn’t anything to go by. Glad you saved me the work of doing this myself, thanks.
To be clear, I’m not trying to justify leaving it at 20; I wanted it to be 25 or 30 myself. I just think that even if it had moved, the conversation we’d be having right now wouldn’t be very different; the cause would just be less obvious.
I’m here for nah fam
and expect to be 95% disappointed
1 Like
Cargo RP should have been raised. In Galileo (not cherry-picking just the one I’ve been following) the “unicorn match” is 41% so far. That’s seems more like “horse in rural town match” to me.
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That is below every field at MSC.