After getting done with the Perry Meridian event today, 4 rotors were engage quite often. In fact, it happened for 48 alliances out of 184 total alliances (this includes qualifications and eliminations). That is a whopping 26.09% of alliances that got 4 rotors spinning. With that said, in your opinion, should IN change the number of pre-populated gears for IN District Championship seeing as they have the right to as stated in section 3.4.2
The number of pre-populated GEARS may change for District Championships
or the FIRST Championship.
So, my question is: should Indiana make it harder to get 4 rotors and if so, how many pre-populated gears should they remove? Thanks for reading and voting.
I’m not sure IN can make this decision on their own. The way I read it, the decision will be made by FIRST for DCMP’s. I assume that’s for all DCMP’s or for none.
The manual text doesn’t make the all-or-none explicit, but I would also be surprised if FIRST interpreted it that way to make an Indiana-only change.
If FIRST wants to give fuel a mild buff, they could move a prepopulated gear off Rotor 4 and onto Rotor 3. That would make the 4-rotor task just as hard as now (which is appropriately hard in 49 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, Mexico, Israel, China, and Australia), but it would make the third rotor happen faster.
The 4-rotor bonus is still OP in playoffs, but I think in most cases (read: anywhere but Indiana so far) that would tip a few more teams towards fuel. If you really want to tip the scales, obviously you take away more prepopulated gears and/or drop the kPa threshold.
It would be nice if FIRST would avoid completely changing the game for DCMPs.
I hate the way that the game objectives are balanced this year, but that’s the game that we got, and that’s the game that people should have designed for. Changing it mid season just doesn’t seem fair to the teams that had a good strategic design process, but ended up playing a different game than they designed for.
Changing point values at CMP happened last year, but that had a much smaller impact on the value of breaching vs shooting than changing pre populated gears would (especially given the step function scoring this year).
Counterpoint: the game we got at Kickoff included the possibility that gears could become less valuable (in the form of having to score up to three additional gears to achieve the same benefit, or a lower kPa threshold for that bonus) at DCMP/CMP. Could a team argue that the long game is the game they should’ve designed for?
Removing pre-populated gears puts less (not more) focus on fuel. We’re at the point in the game (especially in Indiana) where all alliances are getting the third rotor and many are going for the fourth. Removing pre-populated gears isn’t going to stop alliances from doing that, it’s just going to make alliances spend more of their time on the rotors, leaving less time for fuel. To make fuel more relevant, you would need to add pre-populated gears.
The various DCMPs are quite different. In Indiana, removing pre-populated gears probably makes the game more interesting. At other DCMPs, it might put the fourth rotor out of reach, which makes the game much less interesting. Therefore, I’d say don’t remove pre-populated gears from the fourth rotor to ensure it’s a reasonable goal at every DCMP*. Removing or keeping the pre-populated gear on the third rotor doesn’t make any huge difference, and I’d say keep it to give alliances slightly more time for fuel.
*But consider removing them for the championships, which are supposed to have high levels of play
That is a completely reasonable argument, and because FIRST built into the game the fact that it might be changed, I’m not going to be outraged or anything if it does change.
That being said, this season has been a season of moving targets and question marks. How much force does it take to activate a hopper? Who knows. How fast do the boilers count? Who knows. How fast will the boiler start counting? Who knows. Is this a legal rope? Who knows.
The amount of information about the game that we don’t have this year is literally exhausting, and I really don’t want any more things up in the air. Engineering a robot is hard enough without not knowing what you’re engineering it to do.
Is 26.09% supposed to be frequent enough to warrant a change in scoring? Splitting it up, it was 19.59% in quals and 52.78% ( :ahh: ) in playoffs. While it’s certainly blowing other regions out of the water for 2017 numbers, let’s compare that to 2016. At Perry Meridian 2016, captures happened 43.94% of the time in quals and 56.26% of the time in playoffs, and there was no change prior to DCMP play. It took the whopping 51.35% quals and 63.37% playoffs of week 7 (DCMP only) play for FIRST to change the thresholds at Championship. It’s also worth noting that there weren’t really any appreciable differences in the playoff capture rates between Perry Meridian and Indiana DCMP play in 2016.
I see the argument for adding pre-populated gears to boost fuel, but at the same time there were a lot of matches this past weekend where late-match heroics secured Rotor 4 for teams. Teams that missed Rotor 4 were only missing it by 1-2 gears much of the time, and that was with virtually every team not named CyberTooth focused on gears. (A few were shooting preload in autonomous, an even smaller number in teleop as some late efforts before climbing.)
Make the fourth rotor (and its bonus) Really Really Freakin’ Hard, and I think we see more matches like Week 1 where 3 climbs, 3 rotors, and some fuel becomes the game again because alliances will have to make an epic, clean, Indianaesque-because-you-probably-couldn’t-do-it-under-defense run to get back to 4.
Considering there are three district events in Indiana, the upper portion of the last event is going to be pretty close to the INCMP lineup.
Heck in match 48 we even played defense against a human player who carelessly left not 1 but 2 gears sitting on the peg for us to return to play for them. Wish we had recorded it from the other side. Still not 100% sure there wasn’t a foul in there, but he said it was an impulse and he did confuse just about everyone there as to what happened.
Yeah if four rotors are even more common in quals at INcmps, auto and defense are going to be the deciders in most matches in quals, definitely in elims.
The idea that strongly offensive robots should not play any defense at all has to change in Indiana if the starting gear number doesn’t change, and I’m betting it won’t.
Think the issue is basically a game of chicken. When both alliances are capable of the fourth rotor, each alliance can make the decision to go for three rotors and defense where the win condition is stopping the fourth rotor and gaining points through other means(climb and fuel). Or they can go for four rotors themselves and either gain an edge through other means(climb and fuel) or hope the other alliance fails to get four rotors. I can see why it would be hard a lot of alliances to make this decision and I’d imagine going for four rotors ends up being the default strategy. I would argue like others though that adding pre-populated gears would make the game more interesting, not removing them.
