This weekend my team went up to Worchester Mass for a state competition, and were pumped to get back into the zone, after a long summer without any robotics. We were doing pretty good, and never lost a game, although not every match was fair. Our first match had no opponents. This proposed a major problem our team had to deal with, do we go and just try our hardest, and get no SP’s, or do we not move, and disappoint the judges for abusing the system. We decided to try our best, and what a mistake that was. By our last round, we were ranked second, and only behind by a couple of SPs. The first team’s robot wasn’t a good robot, and the reason they were so high up, was that they scored points just slightly faster than their opponents, getting more SPs than us. But overall, their robot was greatly lacking. The third place team was an excellent team. We shared a room with them and ended up getting along very well. But our problem was this: In alliance selection, if we denied the first place team, they would have chosen the third place. If the third place team had denied them, then we could not choose them to be on our team. It was physically impossible to find any way to team with who we wanted to! We were stuck with the first place team, and lost round one because of the improper team selection. Im confident when I say if we teamed up with the third place team like we wished, we would have been able to hold strong and very possibly win.
So the point to this long over-worded story is to question the ranking and point system that is unique to vex. It is smarter to barely beat a team than to demolish them, even if you are a better robot, and to score less just on purpose, I feel, is just not in the vex spirit, and greatly promotes equality rather then striving to win. I lost a chance to go to Dallas this year because the game had to be “equal” rather than a competition. Anyone else feel that we need a makeover on the ranking system, or is there any way to beat it?
-Team 822