My opinion is Surrogate Matches are strange

[Technologyman00]

Why are surrogates a thing? Couldn’t some teams just be doomed/blessed to play another match? Ranking points are averaged and preferential schedules already exist otherwise, why not have a couple teams play more?

According to 11.6 they don’t affect RP. But they do appear to change tie breakers. It seems weird you can’t directly gain ground off them, but also can. In this match, Qualification 28 - 2023 FIRST Championship - Hopper Division - YouTube, it reports that 1792 a surrogate went down. (Disclaimer I was previously on the team but am not actively on the team anymore).

I tried to see how the tiebreaker rankings changed on TBA but I must not understand how they are calculated because for every team I get different numbers.

[Lil_Lavery]

If the quantity of matches per team is divisible by 6, you don’t need surrogate matches. Just another reason why the district format, and it’s 12 matches/team in qualifications, has advantages.

[Ryan_Blue]

@Technologyman00

it reports that 1792 a surrogate went down.

Rankings shift around teams that aren’t in the current match all the time, you just don’t see it on the results screen.

Unless the number of teams * number of matches per team is divisible by 6, there will always be teams that have to play more than their allotted matches. To me, at least, it’s preferable that the extra matches don’t count towards the team’s ranking average.

[petercooperjr]

@Technologyman00

According to 11.6 they don’t affect RP. But they do appear to change tie breakers. It seems weird you can’t directly gain ground off them, but also can. In this match, Qualification 28 - 2023 FIRST Championship - Hopper Division - YouTube , it reports that 1792 a surrogate went down.

Are you sure you’re just not seeing that 610 went up to 43rd place, passing by 1792, meaning that 1792 went from 54th to 55th (because a team passed them and their score didn’t change)?

@Technologyman00

Couldn’t some teams just be doomed/blessed to play another match?

There’s some discussion of this concept in some of @Caleb_Sykes’s work:

Match Scheduler Criteria

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Modified Tournament Rules

The tournament section of the rulebook is one of my favorite parts of the game manual to look at each season. This section is largely season-independent, but is a very important part of the competition. I’m curious if, as a part of the game design challenge, anyone has seriously looked at re-writing the tournament section of the rulebook. I know it’s not critical for the submission process, but it is always possible that it has come up in discussions. If anyone has created any materials for the…

[Technologyman00]

@petercooperjr

Are you sure you’re just not seeing that 610 went up to 43rd place, passing by 1792, meaning that 1792 went from 54th to 55th (because a team passed them and their score didn’t change)?

Welp if that is what happened then that would solve it! Thank you!

[Alex2614]

The other alliance members on that alliance moved up, which may have moved 1792 down only because one of the other two red teams took their place or ended up ranking higher. In other words, 1792 moved down BECAUSE 610 and 1323 moved up and ended up ranking higher than 1792. This would have happened even if 1792 wasn’t in that match at all, because teams move up and down the rankings outside of their schedule due to other teams moving above or below them. This has nothing to do with tiebreakers, it’s just how rankings work.

I’m also not sure how giving random teams a statistical advantage is better than just having them play a surrogate match. That just doesn’t make sense to me. There is already a significant element of luck involved in FRC rankings, and giving a random couple of teams an extra luck-of-the-draw advantage over other teams seems less than ideal.

Edit:

@petercooperjr

Are you sure you’re just not seeing that 610 went up to 43rd place, passing by 1792, meaning that 1792 went from 54th to 55th (because a team passed them and their score didn’t change)?

You posted this right as I was writing my reply and I didn’t see it. Thank you for stating what I was trying to say in much fewer words!