I think I’ll be that guy too since I believe our team, 379, performed pretty well at the Miami Valley Regional and finishing in 1st place before being eliminated in the semis.
Here is a playlist of almost all of our matches:
I’d like to drop a mention for 340, our first pick after we seeded first at CNY. We won with them because their bot is crazy fast at the scale, vault, and switches, and they have the drivers to make it work scary well. I’m very happy we could play with them; they were clearly the best possible pick for us.
Other top contenders in my book were 319, 639, 5254, 20, 27, and 4253.
I would trust a blind, freshman scout before I trust OPR for Power Up.
With that said, 5686 definitely had a solid bot this year!
I think the actual number this year is very arbitrary. So comparing OPR accross events, will be all but useless. However, I would trust OPR to roughly sort the teams within an event correctly by offensive ability.
Well technically you are trusting the game announcer to be accurate in that scenario. Which at most events is not the worst option.
That being said this was an amazing week 1, I hope it is a sign of things to cone with this game. Lots of great options this week. I am surprised I am not seeing more praise for 33, I guess it is for the same reason no one is mentioning 118 or 148, the performance speaks for itself and doesn’t need advocates
Can confirm this is the case.
Thanks everyone, the poll closes in <2 hours and we are above 250 submissions.
I can’t believe there isn’t more love for Palmetto.
3489 achieved triple climb in multiple matches - something I doubted seeing work in the whole regional!
3641 was the quickest scale scorer I’ve seen from the events I’ve watched. Their ability to flip where they intake and outtake made them a robot nobody seemed to match on the scale.
2614 achieved two cube autonomous in qualification matches (with both switch and scale on their side) and very consistently scored on the scale in autonomous during eliminations. They were also an extremely versatile robot, going through the vault and exchange with plenty of time to spare (faster than any other robot I saw at the regional) in eliminations even though they were also one of the best at the scale.
3140’s defense definitely contributed to their alliance winning the regional (5472-2615-2383; 3140 was the 5th rank alliance’s backup). They seemed to have broken their intake in the QF tiebreaker but were all fixed up by semis.
125 was also an amazing robot. Though they seemed to be having many intake issues, when they were at their best it was something to see. I know they attempted a two cube autonomous, but I don’t think they actually achieved it like 2614 (correct me if I’m wrong). By the end of the regional, they also seemed to get their buddy climb working with second pick 5317.
342 was also a speedy scale robot. It was shocking they weren’t picked until the second round with the rank 1 alliance. They created an alliance of 3 amazing scale robots that took a different strategy than scale-scale-switch/exchange for the 5th rank alliance to beat.
I can’t believe there isn’t more love for Palmetto.
3489 achieved triple climb in multiple matches - something I doubted seeing work in the whole regional!
3641 was the quickest scale scorer I’ve seen from the events I’ve watched. Their ability to flip where they intake and outtake made them a robot nobody seemed to match on the scale.
2614 achieved two cube autonomous in qualification matches (with both switch and scale on their side) and very consistently scored on the scale in autonomous during eliminations. They were also an extremely versatile robot, going through the vault and exchange with plenty of time to spare (faster than any other robot I saw at the regional) in eliminations even though they were also one of the best at the scale.
3140’s defense definitely contributed to their alliance winning the regional (5472-2615-2383; 3140 was the 5th rank alliance’s backup). They seemed to have broken their intake in the QF tiebreaker but were all fixed up by semis.
125 was also an amazing robot. Though they seemed to be having many intake issues, when they were at their best it was something to see. I know they attempted a two cube autonomous, but I don’t think they actually achieved it like 2614 (correct me if I’m wrong). By the end of the regional, they also seemed to get their buddy climb working with second pick 5317.
342 was also a speedy scale robot. It was shocking they weren’t picked until the second round with the rank 1 alliance. They created an alliance of 3 amazing scale robots that took a different strategy than scale-scale-switch/exchange for the 5th rank alliance to beat.
1876 ranked 1st for the second year in a row, winning all 9 of their qualification matches! Their climbing was one of the best at the event.
Check out LamBot 3478, the went undefeated in Monterrey Regional 17-0 226 OPR and can lift 2 robots.
Well, it’s too late now for voting, but most events now have their data published, so here’s the top 25 by Elo:
Team Elo
148 1895
1678 1853
118 1847
610 1843
2046 1833
3478 1786
3005 1783
5172 1783
525 1777
33 1765
4513 1760
1918 1760
829 1754
379 1754
3538 1753
125 1745
1360 1742
1305 1742
4539 1741
2910 1737
2848 1737
4476 1735
1876 1730
3824 1730
1325 1726
Excuse my ignorance, but what exactly is Elo?
OPR is a lot more useful for this game than people many people realize. Because of the nature of the Power Up scoring system 2018 OPR is a reflection of how well teams control a match as opposed to how well they cycle game pieces. So it doesn’t reward a team who scores a lot of cubes but is always behind on possession, but does reward a team who consistently controls possession.
Which means to me that it might reward the team with the nicer match schedule who only plays against teams that can’t score in the scale, and that it isn’t valuable for comparing teams between events.
At CNY, for example, the teams ranked by OPR are roughly sorted by how good they were, but also there’s a team in there that didn’t make the elimination rounds.
That’s a really good point. Winning the Scale/Switch early and maintaining it is obviously an important skill. It also takes good strategy which is additional value in an alliance partner.
My issue with OPR stems from the fact that it is literally useless when it comes to Everybot style robots, and other specialists that focus on the Away Switch (great second round picks). An Everybot will have a terrible OPR and if people don’t understand why that is, they may make a poor decision during alliance selections. OPR is mostly useless when it comes to providing valuable information to teams for who they should select with their 2nd pick. If it isn’t valuable for helping with alliance selections… who cares? It’s very clearly not a number that can be compared between events.
This observation is coming from a really small sample size, but it also seemed like OPR took a long time to sort itself out. I saw some teams on Friday night at the Great Northern Regional in the top 15 for OPR that had no business being there. Although with that said, when I look at the top teams at various events in terms of OPR I say to myself… Yep, that’s a good team.
My favorite scouting metric for this game is total number of cubes scored (regardless of location). This metric is a good indicator for how productive a team is during a match, even when some scoring objectives are easily in hand. Knowing where they scored the cubes is also important obviously.
Scouting for a 1st pick is also an interesting challenge… it’s not just about how many cubes they can place on the Scale. It’s about how accurately they can place cubes on the Scale when there are already 7 of them on there. It’s not something you can see on the field in a lot of cases because 8 cubes rarely end up on the Scale in Quals. In order to really figure out how good a team is at placing, you need to understand the dimensions and functionality of their mechanisms. Which means pit scouting is important this year. Wow that was a long tangent.
Gee thanks ! It’s an honor to the be named right beside those four teams. But to be fair we didn’t really have a “solid” weekend. We had some intake trouble and we found out that our router was defective. That gave us o lot of issues troughout the weekend. Oh, and we did the lowest score possible of 0 in the final 
But our auto was wicked awesome. It failed only once during our second qualification match. But in the finals we had the task of taking ownership of the scale while 1772 did the switch. We did all matches, both opposite and front, flawlessly. When even did 2 cubes in scale in our second semis.
Our climbing mechanism also gave us the opportunity to do a lot of double climb with our 3rd alliance partner 5443. We were able to both climb on the rung without the help of any ramp.
I totally agree with all this. Especially this year. A lot of good scale bot placed low this years. At Montreal, we had 6 rookie team with swith/vault type bot that placed in the top 15. The reasons that this happened is that most scale bot went directly to the scale and ignore the switch. They ended up losing match due to late ownership of their own switch. All the switch bots had to do was getting a cube early in and voila. We didn’t have much defensive play so you kept ownership all the way to the end.
Scouting was extremly important as you could’nt use ranking or OPR as an indication and most of the 15-45 ranked team had the same average cube/match count. Since our first pick (1772) was an highly effective scale bot but could’t climb we went for an OK switch/vault bot(5443) that could climb and that was compatible with our climbing style.
We did have one effective Everybot and it ranked 10th. We had to face them in our quaterfinals since they eventually bacem the 7th alliance captain. I can tell you that those type of bot are annoying!
My concern with OPR this year is essentially similar to Kevin’s, there just not enough sample size. Similar to other games in which teams can contribute meaningfully to the score without obvious quantitative interactions (2009, 2014), there is some inherent value to a metric that seeks to infer the offensive impact of teams beyond the quantity of game pieces they score. However, also similar to 2009 and 2014, so much of the scoring potential of a team depends on their alliance partners and opponents in a given match. I feel there’s simply too much noise in qualification schedule to get a truly accurate OPR measurement.
Instead of OPR, I’d like to see a metric similar to but not exactly the same as CCWM. Pardon my crude math, but imagine a metric that approximately solved a matrix of equations for each match along the lines of MatchPointSpread = Red1 + Red2 + Red3 - Blue1 - Blue2 - Blue3.
Unlike OPR / DPR, the other alliance (and the other alliance’s score) is included, so it would take into account how the strength of the opponents could depress the margin.
As for the actual topic of this thread:
- I don’t like using ELO for rankings since it picks up where last year left off (right?) rather than making new numbers each year.
- 2791 is dope as hell and definitely a top team, pardon my bias
- People aren’t mentioning the traditional powerhouses because they don’t need to mention them in order for others to pay attention
125 managed our 2-cube autonomous at least once.