Championship Day 1 surprises and insigths!

[bbombei]

But but but I thought it was gonna be easy route to the first spot for 1690 and 254?? Thats why they play the matches folks! Your dream team ups may not come true on Saturday, but the playoffs are gonna be crazy I feel.

[Nips]

It doesn’t make much difference but the champs qualifying with fewer 3rd robots and and fewer rookies coming to champs it has become more like the district model where the best robots are coming thus the precious RP and close matches and very high scores. The 2nd reason I believe it is so close and competitive is that this game has one of the greatest scoring values and just the right amount of game pieces for it to be abundant enough and scarce enough.

[Nick.kremer]

@wgorgen

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.

As an example, let’s look at 973 who had 1 bad match (what a doozy that match was) and is ranked 17th as a result, yet look at this match history:

[thatnameistaken]

Looking through 3847’s data, you can argue they’re the best robot on Newton even with that match impacting their averages. If you throw it out it’s very hard to argue otherwise. 0 RP matches are rough.

Still, the match happened. And when teams play against less than half the field, qualification rankings reward reliability even more than playoffs do, since there’s room for multiple teams to go undefeated (and the margin of error can therefore be 0 lost matches, instead of 1 per playoff series). That’s especially true when more elite teams are gathered per division than usual this year - some of those elite teams are more likely to go undefeated by beating other, potentially even better, elite teams than they would be in recent years since there’s more to be matched against.

As another example of the easy RP impacting things, 1114’s one point loss is the difference between 2nd and 7th place right now, which is pretty significant for selection. In prior years, they could hope to keep pounding the bonus RPs at a higher rate than everyone else to claw their way back up - but this year they have to hope several teams above them also drop a match.

[mrnoble]

However Friday plays out, I doubt that anyone’s complaint about Champs-level elimination matches this year will be that “1 picked 2, then they stomped everyone, just like at every other event”

[osofdez]

We might even see a ranked 8th alliance go to Einstein

[dudefise]

Ironic, isn’t it? The game that produced the most dominant 1-seed winnings lost all of that at championships.

It’s not a legend GDC would tell you…

[BJT]

I’ve got a day 2 surprise, this ridiculous barrier attempting to funnel everyone in the pits and stands to one exit. At least people are getting some exercise going under, over, and through it.

[wgorgen]

@LukeB

I found it very interesting (but not surprising) that seemingly the only fields with the favorites expected to see 1 are Newton and Galileo.

Even on Newton, things are not smooth sailing. 27, 973 and 111 are all out of the top 8 at this point but are climbing back up with each match so I expect that we will see all of them rise near the top. 2910 lost 1 bonus RP today that dropped them to 4th. While the current top 3 are all very strong teams and are playing well, I am not sure they would have been considered the favorites to be 1 rank at the beginning of yesterday.

[microbuns]

Followed up with full rankings here:

CMP division rankings if we had 30 cargo RP

Here’s a sheet with the new rankings if the GDC had decided to raise the cargo RP to 30. This brings the cargo RP down from ~85% to 50%. Here’s all the changes to the top 5s it would have done: Carv: 604 goes 1->2, 870 goes 2->1, 862 goes 5->7, 2046 goes 6->5 Gal: 1732 goes 2->3, 694 goes 3->2 Hop: 1678 goes 3->4, 624 goes 4->5, 3478 goes 5->3 New: 7034 goes 4->5, 3461 goes 5->13, 111 goes 6->4 Roe: 2531 goes 5->9, 67 goes 8->5 Tur: 971 goes 2->3, 4414 goes 3->2, 2468 goes 4->5, 5406 goe…

[CarlosGJ]

There had better not be. That’s just as wrong as graciously accepting.

C’mon, CD, we’ve been through this.

[Osby]

I guess I should have put /s/ behind graciously. Maybe they should say H**L No!

There are still going to be a whole lot of declines in alliance selections amongst the top 8 or 9 ranked teams. There are many teams in the top 8 on fields that are not in the top 15 OPR.

There are many teams with high OPRs that are not in the top rankings, your team is one of those. There is going to be a whole lot of deep picks and I hope your team is one of them.