Interesting activity at today’s event. Team has a single goal lifter and is pretty quick. It can grab goals and move into the corner. Not really bothered by the new (to me) strategy of creating a ring moat to keep teams away from goals. Push a goal while they carry a goal and balance so pretty good at the end game. But it’s a pretty simple robot.
By making sure their alliance partners would do the AWP moves, they collected 7 WP. Being part of the winning alliance got them 6 more. So at the end of the event, they were the #1 seed.
Team approaches some of the other teams to work on alliance set ups. Lots of teams from the same clubs/schools/groups. We all know the sister team selection process. They got politely refused by their top picks during the conversations. But they knew the rules of alliance selection, if you decline you can’t be picked by anyone else.
So it’s selection time. 30 teams, 15 alliances in the making. #1 seed asks their 5 and get declines. Some unhappy faces. They then just go down the line, collecting 14 no’s in a row, all the top 15 teams. Now most of the top 15 teams are unhappy. Team placing 16th gets asked and declines, 15 no in a row. Announcer says "you have just declined out of the tournament, you won’t be playing. " Next team that got asked said yes.
I’m pretty sure that 15 in a row is a record.
I was also impressed that the #2 seed picked the #29 team to be their partner (made it to the semi-finals!)
I want to say it was a pretty cool set of eliminations. Rather than facing off with teams that were for example the #1 and #2 seeds or 3 and 4 which can create some really lopsided scores, it was more balanced matches. Scores seemed to be much closer.
I agree with Taran. We don’t need another 200+ post thread.
This happens on rare occasions. Some of the teams probably (especially the team who declined out of the tournament) shouldn’t have declined. Make sure you have backup partners if a team who you think is bad ranks above you. I have also seen a lot of high level teams make the mistake of not prioritizing the AWP. Play smart and have a backup plan in case alliance selection becomes a mess.
This actually happened today at a tournament unrelated to the one you were talking about; the team in question got declined 5 or 6 times in a row I believe. Even the EP got a little frustrated because we were already running behind and the declines held up the tournament further. There’s video proof, but the audio isn’t sufficient enough to actually understand what they’re saying.
I think this is part of what makes it interesting. You can get higher in the rankings with AWP, but AWP doesn’t do anything for you in the eliminations.
15 seems to be a record. It achieved “Nice Topic” status pretty quickly, so I’m going to leave it. Who knows, maybe it will even reach the magic 100 likes.
There is, but there is no sound, so won’t be helpful. You’ll just see a long alliance selection with teams 4-15 becoming unhappy as time went on.
We were on time and the EP knew there was going to be some selection drama, so they were prepared.
Yes, and I think that was one of the reasons other teams didn’t want to partner with them. They had a pretty quick run to the yellow base/lift up away from the grabbers and move back for the eliminations. They hadn’t shown it off, but I think being able to do both will be their next code upgrade. Not a lot of teams yesterday were able to do both.
I haven’t bothered to read the other thread(s), so this might have been said already.
I believe that the AWP is, in a word, dumb. It creates situations just like this, where the goal for qual matches and elim are completely different. I get that the GDC wanted to incentivize auton more, but this is not the way to do it. Auton is already hugely important, as it can often decide the outcome of the match. The only way to make auton more important in a fair way would be a change that affects quals and elims equally, i.e. increased auton win bonus. For this reason, I personally don’t see the point of going for the AWP at all. I don’t see how it can reliably improve your chances of doing better in elims.
I like the AWP, it makes both robots do something together. It’s very simple to create a robot that can move forward and dump preload ring into the goal at the ramp. A little more complicated but not hard is the ring / moving off the line process.
I do agree that the AWP should also count in the elimination part. Maybe moving it to the level of the Auton bonus?
I think it did have some of the desired push, it’s very few teams that don’t have some kind of autonomous at this point in the season.
Last year, the action to complete the AWP was the most important aspect of auton, because it was a guaranteed 6 points and if you didn’t get your homerow, your opponents usually would and you would lose auto. But this year the action to get the AWP is contrary to win autonomous and the match (for the most part), since the neutral goals are the most important aspect of winning auto. You could get 7+ rings on the post but then if you didn’t get the neutral goal, you are at a huge disadvantage in driver control.
Awp does mean the objectives in auton are different in elims vs quals, but why is that a bad thing? teams should be strategizing around this. And I like how it gives teams an opportunity to insulate their ranking from an unfortunate schedule.
My line of thinking was that since AWP is not at all correlated to win percent, it allows situations like what was explained in the op to occur. But I suppose if a team did get all those AWPs, they deserve it. And the seeding system for this year does seem to be really effective, since the top two seeds have more than a 70% chance of winning finals according to http://vrc-data-analysis.com/. This case is just an absolutely extreme case.
to build on these two very important points. AWP demonstrates a randomly paired alliance can achieve a common goal. This is a key factor to selecting a strong alliance partner for elimination rounds. In essence, concrete data to use when Alliance Selection comes. During eliminations, it is really about scoring more points than the other alliance, no SP tactics needed either.
