I am surprised no-one has commented on the lack of seeding bonus based on coopertition. This has been the norm since 2009. Each year, the coopertition value has grown rather than shrunk, and this year, nothing. Could it be the fact that the ccopertition was used as a weapon against powerhouse teams last year? I did see a lot of cooperation last year. Mostly whole regionals cooperating against a few of the top teams at the regional. Perhaps that’s why they eliminated it this year.
Thoughts?
There was no direct bonus in 2010. You got a seeding bonus if you won a close match, rather than a complete blowout. This led to the 6v0 if you knew you couldn’t win, or scoring (possibly several times) for your opponents when you were up by a large margin. The coopertition award was based on the largest number of 2x opponents points, and this served to reduce defense in quals (IMO).
There was no bonus at all in 2011, that I can remember. The coopertition award was based on giving away minibots in qualifications, which I don’t recall ever happening at an event I attended, due to differences in deployment mechanisms and such. The teams who had engineered a good deployment mechanism usually could engineer a good minibot to go with it.
2012 had the coopertition bridge. At the lowest level of competition, it was awful because nobody could balance and you were relying on the skills of your partner to help you win. In the middle, it was OK, but everyone would always do it so it gave you a disadvantage for failing rather than an advantage for doing it. At the highest level, the teams would try to spend less time doing it and more time scoring, leading to more failures and less points. And, as noted, some teams did intentionally try to screw over the powerhouse teams, which is very very bad. The co-op bridge also added a lot of noise to the rankings at any event, and IMHO the point of the ranking system is to estimate the best teams going into elims, to allow the best team to pick first, so intentionally adding noise is directionally incorrect.
AND, to make everything worse, the 2012 coopertition award was based on high coopertition point but a low ranking point. At the first event we went to (week 1), we assumed a team who had co-oped 5 times (more than anyone else) would certainly win the award, but it ended up going to a team who had never done it themselves, were ranked really low because they lost almost every match, and on the field during a few co-ops.
IMO, the 2012 implementation of the co-op bridge AND the co-op award was terrible. I’m glad to see it go. I’m welcome better suggestions, but doing it that way was not good.
Ranking this year is straight high score. No compensation for opposite alliance score. win/loss ratio is not directly important. IE losing a game with a high score is better than winning a game with a low score. Opposing alliance score not directly important for seeding.
Ranking:
1)Total score
2) auto points
3)climbing climbing points
4) Teleop points
5)random sort
So in terms of ranking a good offense is better than a good defense.
The only real cooperation is it is always better to score lots of points as an alliance rather than as an individual team.
This also means as usual, the strategy for seeding rounds is slightly different than elimination when defense will be more important.
No the first sort is QS which is number of wins2 + number of ties1 + number of losses*0
I called it the We Fell Really Bad That Your So Bad Here Have An Award Award.
I think the difference in the seeding system is much more strait-forward than last year. Last year you still did well in seeding no matter what the score was if you could manage a co-op bridge. This years seems faulted, yet more honest. This is a good system on ranking scoring and climbing that offensive robots do. This does not account for any defensive bots, unless they can climb. And in the grand scheme of things, if a defensive bot can’t climb at least a 20 if not a 30, they probably won’t be drafted.
Oop missed that part. :o That makes more sense.
The first method of ranking is Qualifying score, based solely on winning and losing. A defensive robot will be ranked highly if they are able to have enough of an impact on the match that their alliance usually wins.
Please inform me as to how the coopertition points were used for seeding in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Because I don’t recall that being true at all.
2009:
All teams on the winning ALLIANCE will receive a number of ranking points equal to the unpenalized score (the score without any assessed penalties) of the losing ALLIANCE.
All teams on the losing ALLIANCE will receive a number of ranking points equal to their final score
(with any assessed penalties).
So you get ranking points based on your opponents scoring, making it a strategy to score on yourself, also, you were penalized for having too high a score.
2010:
All teams on the winning ALLIANCE will receive a number of seeding points equal to the penalized
score (the score with any assessed penalties) of the winning ALLIANCE plus 5 additional points for
winning the match.
All teams on the losing ALLIANCE will receive a number of seeding points equal to un-penalized
score (the score without any assessed penalties) of the winning ALLIANCE.
Thus, giving the losing alliance YOUR score, and you get your score minus penalties. The 5 bonus points for winning did’t exist week one (we were a week one regional, and quickly figured out that winning meant nothing)
2011:
Each TEAM on the winning ALLIANCE will receive a number of ranking points equal to the
unpenalized score (the score without any assessed penalties) of the losing ALLIANCE.
Each TEAM on the losing ALLIANCE will receive a number of ranking points equal to their final
score (with any assessed penalties).
Giving YOU the losing alliance’s score, if they didn’t score anything, you got zip.
Me too. Dare I call the award “pointless.”
Glad to see coopertition go and accurate rankings to (hopefully) arrive.
The primary method was also still the W/L/T method that is used in this game (and all games from 2004-2009, 2011, and a modified version in 2012). Those ranking points served as a tie-breaker in situations where teams had the same amount of qualification points (which were based on W/L/T). If you’re counting seeding factors that take into account the opponent’s score, that dates back to 2000. It’s also an entirely different ranking mechanism than Co-opertition points/bonuses.
Once again, a completely separate mechanism from co-opertition points/bonuses. This is indeed the one case since 2003 where W/L/T was not the primary ranking method, but aside of the warped scenarios where teams employed a 6v0 strategy (clearly against the intent of the rules, both before and after week 1), it’s not the same as a co-opertition bonus.
Those are ranking points, not qualification points. Similar to 2009, that’s just a tie-breaker used after the W/L/T seeding method. You still got 2 QP for a win, even if they scored 0 points. And there were actually coopertition points in 2011 (from sharing minibots), but they were used to determine the coopertition award.
Those are ranking points, not qualification points. Similar to 2009, that’s just a tie-breaker used after the W/L/T seeding method. You still got 2 QP for a win, even if they scored 0 points. And there were actually coopertition points in 2011 (from sharing minibots), but they were used to determine the coopertition award.
While it is true that the first order sort was by QS, the RS was the second order sort, and many times seeding positions were determined by the second order sort. The point I was making in the original post was that the effect of the coopertition portion of the game became greater over time, culminating in 2012 when coopertition was almost as important as win/loss, and teams could sabotage other teams by denying them those points (a team cannot control its own destiny). And suddenly this year, there is zero, zip, nada, nothing in the way of seeding by coopertition.
I’ve been keeping a spreadsheet of (among other things) the scoring methods for FRC games, and as far as I can tell, this is the first year since 1999 without some kind of “coopertition” aspect in the tournament rankings; most games had at least the RP system of your opponent’s points as a tiebreaker. I’m somewhat surprised that FIRST has gone away from that after so long, and even though I’m generally a very competitive kind of person, I’m not totally sure I like that idea.
I see the modifications to rule T6 as being a close proxy for coopertition this season.
The rule now means that a team risks being disqualified from a Qualification match if any of its partners do not have an inspected robot, even if they only bring a representative to the field and not their robot.
It provides a fairly strong incentive for everyone to help the less able teams to pass inspection early.
That’s an old rule.
At Alamo we had a team get their whole Alliance disqualified because a team that didn’t pass inspection sent their human player out and he refused to leave the field when he was told to by his partners. We found out afterwards that the student was told by his mentor if he came back to the pit before the match was through he was going to be walking home. Way to to inspire the kids.
This really is not in the spirit of First my friends. Winning is very important but it is not everything.
So your complaint is that you can no longer sabotage other teams by sand bagging a match?
Well I’m glad you have an appreciation of poorly thought out awards.
Thanks Ed.
Clearly I’ve spent too much time over the past several years focusing on the Robot rules and not enough on the Tournament rules.