Possable strategy for high ranking points

Competition Rules/Strategy
1

Hello, I am a FIRST Alumni who is now mentoring my former team while attending college. (Just thought I’d introduce myself as I’ve never been very active on Chief Delphi) Anyways, I was scrutinizing this years game manual when I discovered a strategy that may help both alliances in a match when it comes to gaining ranking points. For those who don’t know, your ranking score is determined by the losing alliances score. The winning alliance receives the losing alliances score before penalties, and the losing alliance receives their own score after penalties. Now this is intended to encourage teams to not play defense on the opposing alliance as their score could determine your rank. I think we can take it a step further and have both alliances help each other out so that both alliances can receive high scores and the winner/loser will be irrelevant as the win/lose record has no bearing on your rank.

Now, the layout of the field is such that your alliances scoring zone is right in front of your drivers station, and your feeder station and towers are on the opposite side of the field. This will tend to create a collision zone in the center of the field where robots from either alliance will have to navigate past each other in order to get to their respective feeder stations. The only other option is to throw the tubes from the feeder station as far as you can to your own scoring zone and hope that your robot gets to it before your opponents do.

I have an alternate strategy that will change everything. Talk with your opposing alliance and make the following agreement: to have your alliance’s feeders feed tubes to the opposing alliance. I can think of no reason why anyone would not accept this agreement. If you tell your feeders to feed tubes to your opponents and your opponents decide not to feed tubes to your side, that would only mean that they win, but receive your alliances low score as ranking points due to the fact that they had no tubes to hang. If both sides tell their feeders to feed tubes to the opposing alliance, then both scores will be higher than if feeders feed tubes to their own alliance. Even if you lose, your ranking score will still be higher than if your hadn’t made the agreement.

Edit: Sorry, this is not a viable strategy as Win/lose record determines your rank ahead of ranking points. I apologize for any confusion this may have caused.

2

Are you sure you aren’t reading the 2010 manual? This year is Win-Loss-Tie.

Or am I feeding the trolls?

3

I see a big red light on this idea.

Teams are first sorted by qualification points. You get 2 for winning, 1 for tieing and 0 for loseing. Ranking points are there to break ties.

4

This is all based on the false presumption that your your rank is determined by your ranking score. It is determined by your qualification score. Ranking score is what you are talking about. Qualification score is 2 points for a win, 1 for a tie, 0 for a loss. Ranking Score is the tie-breaker.

5

Teams may end up doing this, but i think the judges/other teams may frown upon this. It doesn’t seem like the spirit of FIRST to me.

Edit: Whoops, looks like it wouldn’t work anyway.

6

I appolagize for this tread, I should have read the manual more thourghly.

7

It should stay in the back of your mind though that defense during qualification matches may not be as important as in finals matches. Letting the other alliance score during qualifications may be a good thing, if only to break the tie, of course.

8

Check out 5.3.3 and 5.3.7
In summation, they state that qualification ranking is first and foremost obtained via a 2 point win, 1 point tie, and 0 point loss. The team with the highest number of points will be seeded first.
If there is a tie (e.g. two times have 4 wins, 2 ties and 0 losses, totaling 10 qualification points), then it goes to Ranking Score, which is what you are talking about. So it is helpful to avoid the other alliance, to an extent.

9

<G33>Neither ROBOTS, HOSTBOTS, nor MINIBOTS may break the planes of the vertically projected borders of the opponent’s LANES… Violation: PENALTY

You can’t enter, reach over, or get near the other teams FEEDER STATIONS.

10

I actually meant that the feeders could throw the tubes into the opposing alliances scoring zone, but the strategy is not viable anyways because win/lose record determines rank before ranking points