The Magical Vanishing District Points - How to Lose Points by Winning a Match

FIRST General Forum
1

How can this happen?:

Based on the existing 2023 rules it seems possible for a team to lose district points if their alliance wins a match. How is that possible?

The answer has to do with this part of the rules involving backup robots:

If a team does not play 100% of the Playoff MATCHES won by their ALLIANCE, their Playoff Performance points equals their ALLIANCE Advancement points multiplied by the percentage of Playoff MATCHES won by their ALLIANCE in which that team was a participant.

Seems straightforward enough, right?

But let’s imagine that an alliance enters the finals from the upper bracket with three wins. During Finals 1 one of their robots breaks down and they lose the match. For Finals 2 they bring in a backup robot and win the match. Then the alliance loses again in Finals 3.

The points for the two teams who played in every match for their alliance is 20 (the normal amount for finalists). However the team that was subbed out gets 15 points, because they played in only 3 of the alliances now 4 total wins. Hold on! So because their alliance won Finals 2, they have 5 fewer district points! If their alliance had lost Finals 2, then the team would get the full 20 points.

This seems very unfair, a team shouldn’t get points taken away from them because their alliance won a match! They should be rooting for their alliance to win, not rooting for them to lose.

How can we fix it?

There are a few ways to rewrite the rule to correct this. One way is:

If a team does not play 100% of the Playoff MATCHES won by their ALLIANCE, their Playoff Performance points equals their ALLIANCE Advancement points multiplied by the percentage of Playoff MATCHES won by their ALLIANCE in which that team was a participant. For the purposes of this rule, wins in the Finals are only counted if that ALLIANCE wins the Finals.

There are a few other ways it can be re-written as well, but I think something along these lines is among the most simple fixes.

Can this occur in other rounds, or only in the finals?:

I have checked the math and I believe this can only happen in the finals. For the other rounds the Alliance Advancement points gained from winning the match will always outweigh the decrease in the team’s percentage of wins played in. In the Finals however it’s possible for a team’s percentage of wins to decrease without the alliance gaining any new points at all.

Has this happened already?:

I am not aware of any situation where this has occurred. I haven’t done an exhaustive search, so it’s possible that this situation has happened and I just don’t know about it. If someone knows of an event where a backup robot has won a finals match, but the alliance ended up losing the best of three, then please let me know.

12 Likes
2

Good find. I’m still skimming through all of the district events, but I found one so far where it seems like this occurd:

edit: seems like the backup never played in a winning match so I’m not sure this event is actually a real example of it. Heres some real examples:

6 Likes
3

Not sure this fixes it. Use the same example, except the alliance wins the finals using the backup robot. The team that got subbed out in the finals now participated in 3/5 of the wins - of the 30 points, they get 18. If they had stayed in and lost the second finals match instead, they would have been finalists and earned 20 points instead.

It’s certainly an interesting edge case… but it may take a little more to get a solution that doesn’t result in possibly losing points for winning a match.

2 Likes
4

Ah you’re right Jon. This happens even when they win in the finals.

I think you could do it with two separate percentages. One percentage for the matches won in the first five rounds that applies for the first twenty points, and then a second percentage for the finals that applies only to the last ten points. Definitely makes the rule more complicated to follow.

It would essentially be the same percentage math for the first 5 rounds, but then 5 pts per win in the finals (like how it was under the old rules).

2 Likes
5

Instead of

For the purposes of this rule, wins in the Finals are only counted if that ALLIANCE wins the Finals.

I would go with

For the purposes of this rule, wins in the Finals are only counted if that ALLIANCE wins the Finals and are counted as one win.

As every other win in the playoffs but the first win in the finals progress the team to a higher rank.

2 Likes
6

Nice, that seems like it could work.

How would it handle the situation Jon mentioned where the alliance wins the finals? Maybe count half of a win if the backup robot played in only one of the two wins?

2 Likes
7

Thanks Brandon.

Poor team 6854 is a great example of this happening. FRC Event Web : Team 6854 (2023)

They were finalists, and if their alliance had lost all of their finals matches they’d have 20 points. Instead they won one, and now they have only 15 points. :slightly_frowning_face:

1 Like
8

The correct answer is that a team should get credit for whatever wins to which they contributed instead of the substituted team.

Officially the tally is written as

Alliance Finish Points
Winner 30
Finalist 20
3rd Place
(loser of MATCH 13)		 13
4th Place
(loser of MATCH 12)		 7

But a little thought shows, it breaks down like this.

Match Number Pts for Match Win
1 0
2 0
3 0
4 0
5 0
6 0
7 13
8 13
9 7
10 7
11 7
12 6
13 7
Finals 10

First of all note that winning matches 1-6 actually earns you zero district points.
On the otherhand to even compete in matches 7-10 you would have needed to win another previous match.

So we can throw those facts in.

And then distribute district points based on number of games won by each robot.

Match Number Pts for Match Win Required wins Pts/Win/Robot
7 13 2 6.5
8 13 2 6.5
9 7 2 3.5
10 7 2 3.5
11 7 1 7
12 6 1 6
13 7 1 7
Champion 10 2 5

Completely fair and a helluv a lot less complicated than the InverseERP function.

9

Rather than adjusting which matches count and when for the purposes of dividing up playoff points, why not just add:

A team which does not participate in one or more finals matches won by their alliance, but participated in all their alliance’s previous winning matches shall not receive fewer than 20 points.

Instead of further complicating the division rules, just give teams that make it all the way to finals a lower bound.

10

Would teams that participated in 3/5 wins for their winning alliance get different amount of points depending on which of the 5 matches they played in? Does it make sense to say “you played in everything before finals, so you get 20 points” and “you played in 2/3 before finals and 1/2 during finals, so you only get 18 points”?

11

I don’t think this quite works. Imagine a team that played and won in their alliances first two matches, but then broke and needed to be replaced for the remaining ones.

If their alliance would lose the next two matches then they would go home in third with 13 points. If the backup robot helps win the event for their alliance, they’d go home with 12 points (30 * 2/5). So by winning the event they would lose one point!

12

How about a percentage point. IF 2 teams work 100% of the matches all the way to finals…1 team plays up to the point they fail to continue…they get a percentage of the final score and the sub team gets the balance. For easy math, the original team that fails did 60% of the matches. The sub would get 40% of the points, the broken team would get 60% of that allotment of points for that team. The other two would get full value of alliance points. The actual individual scoring done for the fail team and the sub team would be full, for the played matches.

This math is for the “bonus” points only…not the actual scoring points. It would not affect the teams that ran 100% of the matches.

13

They fixed this issue in the 2024 rules! But introduced a change from past years.

This is the approach that FIRST took for the rules this year. I’ve double checked the math and everything works out well - no team can lose points if their alliance wins an additional match while they are subbed out. Here are the new rules:

Unfortunately there’s another wrinkle in the current rules, and it differs from past years.

As pointed out in this Q&A, the 5 points per finals win seems to apply to the finalists too. So under the current rules it looks like if the finals go 2-1 then the finalists will earn 25 points. Compare this to the rules in 2022 and earlier -

Here you only get the 5 points per win if you win the series. I think this is what was intended, and I’m somewhat expecting a team update to bring the rules more back to what it was in the past. Maybe not! Would be interesting if they keep it as is.

More discussion on the new change here - Update to Playoff Performance District Points

1 Like