In regards to scouting, can teams who have successfully promoted themselves to scouting teams provide some feedback? What were teams looking for? Are there general qualities that are consistent year to year? This year we had a robot that scores in autonomous, scored during teleop, and balanced well. We made every match and didn’t have technical difficulties. Because of losing matches like 30-17, 22-39, 31-13, and 29-27, we didn’t make it to tournament matches. I’m looking to find out how teams effectively market for an alliance pick when they encounter a situation like this. Thank you in advance for your gracious help.
It is hard for an alliance captain to remember each and every team (especially if they are a member of the drive team or do not have a strong scouting program.) So one general tip is to be distinctive - for example, Team 100 is a bunch of orange people with a decorated robot and the funny hats.
I haven’t seen your robot/any matches, but I know that talking to potential alliance captains in the pits - preferably not 5 minutes before alliance selection - can get you noticed and remembered as well.
Thank you for your suggestions. I was thinking about creating a business card with our team name/number with all the important aspects of our robot that my students can hand out to all the teams. Maybe one team would bring it with them to the alliance selections. I would think consistently making matches would be important. Anything else year after year that teams would look for?
I don’t know how other teams scout at a competition, but my team uses premarily performance on the field and a teams ability to fit into our intended strategy to select our alliance partners for the eliminations. Some times there are other intangibles at play, but those are mostly for tie breakers between two even teams.
Our scouts track every ball scored and every Coopertition and Alliance balance. We also, scout teams robots in the pit to determine wheel orientation, drive train type, build quality, etc…
We use that information to determine who the best scorers, both hybrid and teleop, and the best balancers. From there we make our list of the top 24 teams for the first pick and also a list of teams that fit our balancing strategy. During alliance selection we check off teams as they are selected and evaluate both lists to determine which available robots fit what we plan to do.
Without scouting the competition you were at, I can’t say why you weren’t picked for the tournament. But, one thing that is very unique in this game is teams specifically selecting teams to leave open the possibility of a triple balance.
In our first two events, this has been our #1 priority during alliance selection. At the Northville district this weekend, there was a group of about 10 robots that performed pretty well on the field, but had a “long” wheel base configuration that would not have fit with our strategy and first selection. If these teams had built a wide robot, they would have been in the tournament.
I’m not trying to say long robots cannot triple balance…it just more difficult and a risk we were not willing to take.
This years game is pretty unique that you can’t just pick the next best team that is available. It makes alliance selection very interesting…sometimes confusing and other times frustrating.
What Christopher (Randomness) said. A distinctive team/robot is always a very good thing to have. Team 100 is a prime example of this (Gotta get me one of those hats one day…)
To add on to this list, you want to make sure you are known by other teams. This is the huge social aspect of FIRST. Talk to teams often. Very often. Go around the pits every once in a while and talk to people. Make friends. Get to know the team members, and robots, very well. Getting on a FIRST name basis is also great, with team members, and the robot.
Not only does this make your team look good, but it also opens up so many opportunities. Working well in alliances, alliance selections, and even future team collaborations. 256 is currently in collaboration this year with 2489, because their team leader (BeltSanderRocks) and I became friends on CD, met at an offseason, and became good friends.
My final, and favorite tip: Be a strategist. Literally write down winning strategies and scenarios with you and other teams. I make a few hundred each year, and they become ever so helpful. To be able to go up to a team and say “We would work well together because of X, Y, and Z, and if we do 1, 2, and 3 we will win every match ever”, is one of the largest selling points for teams. Don’t tell someone you’d be good with them. Show them. Use statistics, logic (Nerds love logic), and even give match examples of you two working together if possible.
Great thread idea! I can’t wait to learn from what everyone says!
Be honest about your team’s robot. An assessment like you gave in this thread, with more specific numbers (say, “we balanced X times in Y matches and didn’t attempt the other Z times”), would probably be just about perfect. Or if there’s a minor technical issue that you fixed and started performing better on the second day.
But if you stretch the truth, and the scouting team of the team you’re talking to spots that, then they’ll have the real data, and that can make you look bad to that team. That’ll probably hurt your chances of getting picked.
And yes, be proactive. Stop by sometime Saturday morning–if you’re on the bubble that might be enough to get you scouted one last time before picking.
The real fun trick is to talk to the rookie/sophomore teams who are in prime position to be picking–they may not quite know what they’re doing, so they’re the most likely to remember that “oh hey, team XYZ does this stuff, let’s pick them”. But, be careful with doing that… they may or may not be making a good choice to advance out of the quarterfinals.
Along with everything else that has been said, I’d like to add a few more points. Something that’s in the back of my mind as an alliance captain is what team do I know is willing to work with me? As in, there are always teams out there who are pretty intent on doing their own thing. What makes an alliance exceptional is teamwork and the ability to work together and adapt, and I always want a partner that I know will stick to the strategy and be a good team player.
This goes along with making friends; I make it a point to network as much as possible throughout the course of the competition. The practice field is valuable too; 3456 practiced double balancing with several potentially high-ranked teams early in the competition and even practiced tripling.
Finally, accentuate what makes you unique. Tell teams why they want you over another equal or slightly better team. For us, we made sure to document that 1) we were one of only 3 teams in the competition to triple balance, 2) our driver has 3 prior years of experience, with 2 ending in driving at Championships, 3) we have a unique drive train that is extremely effective at balancing, and 4) we can clear balls from under the bridge effectively. Even though we scored very few balls the entire competition, we were picked three times during eliminations for our balancing! I think the main reason for this was our distinctiveness and networking. I’d recommend coming up with a list of unique traits that will make you stand out. The third pick robots, especially this year, can become extremely critical to success in eliminations.
These are awesome ideas! Thanks for the feedback. We always stuck to the plan our alliance agreed upon but how are you able to quantify that to scouting teams? Also, sometimes that hurt us. One of our losses was 9 to 10 because we were doing the coopertition bridge that we were on but the opposing alliance couldn’t get up the bridge. In the meantime our alliance team was supposed to balance the red bridge and never did it. The extra 10 points we had demonstrated in 3 other matches would have won that match. Is that how you quantify that you are good at teamwork and executing the agreed upon strategy? I appreciate all your suggestions!
Some very good teams scout to a very large extent based on match performance. And it’s usually those very good teams occupying the first few alliance captaincies.
If you haven’t performed especially well in your matches, you’re not going to be a credible choice as their first pick. In fact, depending on your tolerance for not getting picked at all, you may want to consider aiming to satisfy the needs of those top alliances in the second round, rather than be a lower first-round pick with weaker prospects of winning the tournament.
Does it look like those top teams will need someone who can climb the bridge with them every time? Then explain to them that your capability is better than most other robots (because of certain features, as demonstrated in several matches). Do they need smart defence? Then prove to them your drive team understands strategy, executes well, and is willing to accept overall direction from the alliance captain. (Maybe describe a match where your alliance’s strategy worked well, and how you contributed.)
Also, you’re going to need to reach out to these teams on Friday afternoon. There’s inevitably a meeting to discuss the first day’s performance on Friday night, from which a preliminary pick list is generated. You need to be as high as possible on that list, and if your performance hasn’t been fantastic, you need to at least hope for a favourable annotation about your team’s other qualities.
When I am looking at teams for potential alliances, I look solely at the team, not the win-loss-tie record. That’s how many great teams do it, so I’ve adapted it and it works quite well. Most people look only at what you do. I don’t care if you lost match 17 34-26, I care how many of those 26 points you scored, by what means, and what YOU did. I don’t care what your alliance members did, and for the most part, I don’t care what your opponents did (I do care sometimes).
All in all, nobody is going to look down on you for loosing a match, or for something your alliance members screwed up on, and if they do, there are obviously better alliance partners for you than them.
It didn’t seem to matter at our regional. I don’t know if teams weren’t recording those stats. I know that the match you talked about we scored 16 of the 26 points. I’m seeing that I need to quantify all of our stats and get them out better. Some teams selected for the tournament only scored 2 pts and had history of technical issues. They did feed the balls during autonomous to the #1 robot but that was an easy recoding after alliance selection that we could have done as well. One problem I am seeing is that we relied on the idea scouting teams would see what we could accomplish. We will definitely be more proactive next year! Great feedback from everyone!
…That match was hypothetical. i made it up. 
What you are describing to me doesn’t seem accurate. I am in no way calling you a liar, but there are some things you say that don’t look 100% accurate. I have never seen a regional where the not as good robots are chosen for alliances over the good ones.
Also, that is a great goal. Be proactive next year. You can’t rely on the other team’s scouters. Go up and show them yourselves.
As an aside, you might also make sure your team scouts your own team’s performance as objectively as you scout the other teams…then you’ll see where you fit in, and you’ll get a better idea of how other teams see you (assuming they are doing performance based scouting).
I talked with the scouting people on a couple of the higher seeded teams, they definitely were looking at the field performance of the other teams, and basing their alliance selection largely on that.
While I completely agree with your point, there are situations where you can gather a lot of information based on what a robot’s partner does. At Wisconsin this past weekend, 2169 routinly had their third partner block inbound passes, play defense on fender scorers and other smart strategies. From this, we learned that 2169 was a very smart team that scouted, understood strategy, and could lead alliances. It does take an experience scout/group of scouts to pick up on these things, though.
Jim,
We don’t have the student power to have our own “scouting team” yet. It would be interesting to get those stats from one of the large higher seeded teams. Do you know anyone that has them. We followed teams we knew personally and saw them get picked even though it didn’t seem like they performed on the field and had technical issues. When we were alias in a match they tipped easily trying to balance in coopertition since they had never balanced. We had multiple balancing bonuses and a coopertition balance. But the quantifying statistics by team would help. The android app only added up the alliance scores for each category for each match the team was on and not the actual performance of the team. If you know anyone that has them it would be nice to see and use as a training for my team to do scouting next year. Thanks.
Ask for collaboration with a neighboring team at your next regional (through some blue alliance research, I’m guessing next year). Granted you guys have to share data, you now have twice the manpower literally at your hands and the ability to gather solid data. Besides, it’s a great opportunity to make friends and solidify your relations with other teams.
As for promotion- SELL YOUR ROBOT (AND I DON’T MEAN LITERALLY:p ). Create the opportunity. Put your robot above the others.
As many others had said to me, you can’t just go up and say our robot is a great match for you guys. You have to sell on your best aspects of the robot (in this case, it just seems that you guys have the solidity of everything- which amazing!). Some of the best robots fly under the radar simply because it doesn’t look good or the team just didn’t have substantial scouting data. I have a vague suspicion that your robot and team went under the radar because of both. In short, SELL!!!
Hope this helps for next year!:]
This year in Sacramento, 4159 ranked 10th so we knew we would be picking an alliance. As a result we sat down as a team on Friday night and wrote down all other 49 teams on a whiteboard and went down the list and wrote down the pros and cons of each team. The observations were taken from almost all matches on Friday. It was extremely helpful, but what really helped us get an even better idea of teams (seeded below us) were the ones that approached us on Saturday letting us know they would like to work with us. 3256 gave us a nice flyer with their robot information on it (Very nice guys, I really liked it!) This is a very good strategy and it makes you remember the teams.
But as others have said, you need to maintain relationships with teams. For most, scouting starts on Thursday morning. That’s when you really let people know who your team is and why you will be good to work with. Friday/Saturday just affirms or negates what you stated.
We participate in 2-3 team scouting alliances each year for this very reason. The logistics of setting it up and getting everyone data for their matches can be a nightmare at a small regional (since somebody is up basically every third match), but it makes it so students don’t have to devote as much of the day to scouting matches.
I have old quantitative scouted data for several regionals dating back to 2009. Feel free to shoot me a PM if you would like a sample.
For our team, our pick list is almost totally based on robot capabilities (wide robots only this year, if possible) and match performance, with priority put toward the more recent matches. If one tries to sell himself or herself to us, we will cross reference his or her claims with our quantitative data and impressions by our subjective scouters.
Thanks again for your posts. These are great procedures you are using. I appreciate your gracious professionalism in making our team greater for next year!
Team 1410 at our regional gave me a sheet of paper with robot specs on it which i proceed to write every other bit of scouting info I needed for the day on. If you gave every captain from a high seeded team a print out for them to keep track of teams and what they are able to do well on when they go up to pick, I am sure that one would pick you.