Anyone have data for each subdivision on the highest ranked team (after quals) that was not picked for an alliance?
We were part of that cohort, I think, and my kids will want to take a look at why were were passed over as they plan for next year.
Thanks for any help you have to offer, and congratulations to all the teams there for making it to the event.
Rank =/ robot abilities
Good teams scout and rank doesn’t factor in picking teams.
Rankings are not a good indicator for skill. Sometimes, good teams have a lower ranking because they had a tough schedule. Other times, the reverse happens and a team gets a higher ranking than they deserve. When this happens a lot of times they will have a ranking that would lead to being picked if everyone is just picked based off of ranks. However, teams scout and that team is normally not picked. Another thing that can happen is a robot being good at a select task but non of the alliances need that skill set when it comes around for their second or third pick.
Some of what I said here may apply.
Rank may not tell the entire story. Perhaps during quals you had strong partners or were matched against teams that had mechanical issues. There is way more to picking alliance partners than rank.
Archimedes:
3932 at rank 12
Carson:
1137 at rank 14
Carver:
1262 at rank 12
Curie:
5279 at rank 19
Galileo:
4499 at rank 15
Hopper:
686 at rank 13
Newton:
2035 at rank 15
Tesla:
2522 at rank 13
On the inverse, what was the lowest ranked team picked first?
1986 on Archimedes was Rank 16.
Could be 548. We were ranked 48th in Tesla (10th in OPR) and were the first pick of the fifth alliance.
Agreed. Especially in this game, there is so much more to a robots ability than seed. We, team 5940, seeded 69th, but were still picked as back up for the 4th alliance.
Oh, I thought this was about first picks overall. For first pick by any alliance, 3098 was the first pick of the 8th alliance on Archimedes and was seeded 53rd. Close second was 4920 on Hopper, also first pick of the 8th alliance, seeded 52nd.
Likely. I just ran Archimedes and Carson. 3098 was 53rd and was 1st pick of 8th alliance in Archimedes. 868 was 42nd and 1st pick of 6th alliance in Carson. Our team 3824, was ranked 47 and was 1st pick of 8th alliance.
In a nutshell, was ranking a poor metric of performance this year, more so than other years? I don’t recall so many low raked teams being picked so early compared to prior years. What was it about this year’s game that skewed ranking from individual performance?
We were ranked 32 on Newton and were the first pick of 217.
Ed, thanks for posting this. This is some of the best advice I’ve seen on CD, especially in terms of marketing your team. What is your opinion on the rate of low ranked teams being picked so high this year? I’ve seen this before, but don’t recall it at such extremes in each division. Am I wrong or was there something about this year’s game that amplified this effect.
Results indicate that was a pretty good pick. 
217 is good at scouting.
16 seeded 42nd (OPR Rank 13), and 125 seeded 33rd (OPR Rank 17) – both were picked before you were. Teams that do a good job of scouting will generally make pick lists based on their own data, ignoring seed. OPR is more useful than seed, but not a substitute for good scouting.
Good scouting is much harder to do than most teams appreciate. My own team has worked very hard at scouting this year, and we think it is still one of our top opportunities to improve. BTW, several Newton teams were higher on our pick list than they were in the OPR rankings. Your team was one of them.
Back to the original poster’s topic: top seeded unpicked team is not important at the Championship, because alliance captains have a 3rd pick instead of a backup robot. I think 4 team alliances make a better tournament, especially at events with 40 or more teams.
This year definitely seemed like many great teams seeded extremely low for their ability. If your team is stuck with a dead robot (which occurred far more often this year), then you are pretty much screwed for the capture and it can make breaching difficult if they are right on a defense. Losing just a few ranking points due to some unlucky events can be the difference from seeding top 8 to seeding bottom 20.
This year at our first event for the first day we were only with one other functioning robot (or even once by ourselves) more often than we were with 2 working robots capable of at least challenging the tower.
I remember in Boston team 125 suffered from a lot of issues very early on and got rather unlucky so they seeded 28th, however they were a first pick of the second alliance and went on the be finalists at the event.
Before I say anything else, I want to say the GDC did a great job. I really like this game.
Ranking is usually not a good indicator of robot ability especially with 10 matches and 75 teams. It is not enough to bubble up the best robots. On top of that the ranking point system is not just based on wins and losses. I really don’t mind it too much. It is just a different objective function to try to maximize. It makes the strategy more interesting. However the RP rewards teams for things other than just robot ability.
This year the main reason for the ranking system to fail in bubbling up the best robots is because of the game. In many games, one exceptional robot or two good robots can carry the whole alliance regardless of who their partners are. This year that is not the case. That makes the match schedule the primary determining factor of the outcome. Teams that have a “lucky” draw will rank higher than if they had an average draw. There are many teams who can contribute to the scoring and very few robots can completely dominate the game on their own.
The delta between 20th and 55th was roughly 5 to 8 RP.
That’s two unfortunate matches.
868 was ranked 42nd in Carson after Quals with an OPR of 64.40 (2nd in the divison to 1024). 868 was the first pick of the 6th alliance.
I may have had bad luck, but this season I noticed many more robots losing communication and browning out. I believe this plays a big role in this ranking phenomenon. In addition to a win being much harder to attain with two robots, the ranking point from a capture can almost impossible to obtain, depending on where the robot fails (unless you have the crazy pushing power of 25).
On Archimedes, one of our driver’s controllers failed during our match with 1986 and 4183, rendering us immobile for the entirety of teleop. While they and our other partner still won us the match, we could not complete a capture. With that extra RP, 1986 would be ranked 13th rather than 16th and 4183 would be 25th instead of 29th. These are small differences for non-picking teams at a 7 team event, but they reflect the impact of failing partners.
On the flip side, one of our partners was a no-show and another lost comms at the beginning of the match. We lost both matches by less than ten points, and even with towers weakened to 0, could not capture. Those almost four RP matches became 1 RP matches. This is a six ranking point difference, which on Archimedes was the difference between ranking 20th and 50th, 10th and 34th, or 1st and 10th.
I’ve shared 1257’s anecdote about not picking based on ranked before. I’ve quoted it below: