I was just curious as to how everyone’s human player did at the regionals, were they able to get it on the rack, if so how many? Or did they throw it to the robot and if so, how did that work?
In general it really doesn’t work, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try it. In the fourth match of the semifinals (it was 1-1 with one tie) our human player got a ring on the rack. The match ended 32-0. We had one robot at 12" and the other team just barely missed getting one robot at 12". If they had that ring would have won it for us.
But in general no human player can get it on better than 1 in 20 or so. Mostly people throw to their robots unless their robots are not attempting to score.
At Jersey I know very few teams successfully put any up. During one match when we were not allowed onto the field while IFI worked with us due to Master Code issues they had, I was able to make one onto the rack while both of our alliance partners attempted to ramp each other. We ended up losing 60-2, since the other alliance recognized that they could ramp two and beat us without having to play any other strategy.
612’s human player scored on the rack three times in matches that counted for something including playoffs, he never attempted to throw it on more than 25 times because we were always in the middle with the least ringers and they were used primarily to feed the bot
3/25 is good odds tho
I passed on the BAE human player sharpshooter crown to blond haired Bobby of Team 151, who I believe made three shots during gameplay on Friday. Gave him a bandit bandanna and everything.
I’m disappointed more teams didn’t seem to put more practice into this. Obviously the tubes were very difficult to throw, but there could have been some major strategic implications this year, especially by scoring on the highest tier. In 2003 (Raise the Bar) I spent the entire season mainly practicing with the playground balls, and developed two trick shots–one where I scored in the mini goal from across the field, and one where I threw the ball over our 9’ goal, under the 10’ bar, and descored the 2x multiplier from our opponent’s goal. Sound like a waste of time? I used both to win two separate matches in gameplay that year.
That’s why I like it when the human players have more interactive roles–it allows for some awesome strategy development. This year, it didn’t seem like many teams spent much time practicing deploying the tubes as human players. Even if you didn’t try to score on the spiders–although think of what a marketable skill it would have been to have a human player who could have scored three in a row on the top two tiers!–many teams didn’t seem to be able to reliably and accurately place the tubes on the field!
If there are any teams whose human players have downtime between now and their next regional, I’m telling you: spend a couple hours a day practicing throwing the tubes, and it can really help at comp.
i myself would say that one of our human players were exceptionally good many robots that pickes rings right in front of them didnt need to move much cuz our human player threw the rings practically right in front of the robots but he didnt throw one on the rack but hes still good
In the pratice matches in DC I was about 3 for 60, but I couldn’t make any at VCU. I probably hit the spider arms 85% of the time though. I even had one that bounced off the top of one of the stingers.
I noticed one human player(can’t remember team number) was very consistent in the fact that he could get it to the rack every time. Our human player was able to do that as well, but he never scored. Heck, in a practice match even I came close to scoring once, but i wasn’t consistent enough to play.
during thursday i was about 1 in 6 making it on to the rack and about 1 in 8 throughout the day on friday when i actually tried there were a few matches where i had to hand them to other teams robots or throw them out there for the robots. i found if you hold it vertically over your head with both hands and throw it as if you are throwing a soccer ball back into play it will twist and is likely to land on the bottom spider legs.
yeah, our HP did a similiar move, which we dubbed ‘the tomahawk’, only he never scored. it seems that if you trow toward the sides of the rack rather than the middle of it, chances are greater.
For a while, our human player had scored more than our robot. Then we finally managed to get a match where we had everything plugged in, the code worked, etc, and that quickly changed.