Let me preface this by saying that im not trying to lay this out as absolute fact, rather just something I think everyone should consider. Ultimately I see this mostly as a warning for the GDC to consider when creating future games.
When I first heard about a winpoint being awarded in autonomous I was concerned, as a winpoint should represent winning a match overall and not completing a certain task in auton. I understand that the GDC is trying to push for more teams to dive into programming, as always, but I don’t think this specifically accomplishes what they think it does.
By allowing winpoints to be awarded in autonomous you are really just undercutting the value of a winpoint itself. A winpoint is only as valuable as the competitors think it is. If competitors don’t see getting a home row done in auton as valuable, beyond getting a wp from the task, they will still just pick the team with best match stats and forego the rankings all together.
Now I think the auton wp is structured pretty well in Change Up, as getting a home row in auton would have already been one of the most valuable autonomous routines. Now if there came to be a more valuable strategy for auton, like if ball locking was still a thing, then the auton wp would easily skew the rankings. I would much rather select a partner with a ball locking auton than I would a partner with a home row auton. While this isn’t a huge issue for Change Up at the moment, since getting a home row would have still been valuable with or without the wp, it could become an issue in future games.
Finally, why I don’t think the auton wp will change what the GDC, VEX, and the RECF wanted to change. Due to the factors above and what I will mention soon I don’t think we will see many more low tier teams running autonomous this season. Autonomous has always carried great weight, getting a few extra game objects scored at the beginning makes the match easier for driver control and if you win you get more points added to your score at the end. What stops teams from diving into programming an autonomous isn’t the value of it, instead it’s the difficulty of the task that stops them. Probably the hardest part of autonomous is accurate chassis movement. As far as I can tell there is a huge gap between the inconsistent and unreliable time based or “go-to” autons and Far more reliable motion profiling and odometry autons. This cannot be solved by artificially inflating the value of an autonomous. I don’t know a solution for this exact problem, but I don’t think the auton wp fixes it.
If the GDC is planning on implementing this in the future they will have to seriously consider how it is executed every time. Otherwise a single trip up in game design could severely hurt the tournament rankings and bracket.
To sum it up, the auton wp might change who gets to pick in alliance selection, but not who gets picked.