I can vouch that @33011XAmb 's team was consistently one of, if not the best teams at the events they went to. The raised fields were unfamiliar to some of us, and even my driver (who had practiced sitting down to get familiar with them) was having issues. The qual rankings were, imo, not where they should’ve been. @spike (Who I think is on 9635A?), @33011XAmb, 2777E, 5139C (both not on the forums, to my knowledge), and my team were agreed to be the best robots at the competition. Only two of those teams broke top 5. The first and second teams asking everyone in the top 10 teams meant that alliances would be made of one good team and a mid team. The lower ranked teams that got picked by the higher ones knew that they wouldn’t have made it to elims were it not for the events that transprired.
As for a resolution, I don’t think there should be one. I doubt that this happens that often, and I firmly believe what happened was just a fluke. The only real ways to get accurate qual rankings is to either have 1v1 matches, bo3 quals, or more matches, all of which would dramatically lengthen events. The EP running the competition kept a tight schedule, and we still ended up getting there at 8am and leaving at 5pm.
tldr: I posted this to showcase a crazy event that most of us haven’t seen, personally I don’t see anything wrong with the current rules.
Again, this is the level of “entitlement” that frustrates me. Why bother competing if Cinderella stories are precluded? Why not take “student-centered” to the logical extreme and just have the students decide which team is the best, w/o actually having qualifiers or elimination rounds?
I get the frustration of losing. I get the frustration of seeing a “less capable” win. That said, the GDC sets out the rules, the EP, Refs, Judges enforce those rules, and the teams play by them.
One alternative would be to do what IQ (I believe) does and do away with selection all-together and just force-match seed 1 as the top 2 teams, seed 2 as the 3 and 4 teams, etc. That, I’m sure, would have it’s own set of issues.
this shows not a flaw in the alliance selection system, which is fine imo, but just the nature of the rankings. Ranking are largely based upon luck. sure, better teams do tend to rank higher, but really ranking are not based purely on skill. there is a large portion of luck involved, most of which nothing you do can prevent. you could get a bad partner every single match, against good opponents every single match. it happens pretty often. you could whitescreen during an important qual, you could get dq’ed off an incorrect ruling, but I don’t really see a way to change the nature of qualification matches tbh. except for rules to eliminate losses due to disconnects and whitescreens, you can’t change the luck element of quals.
having 1v1 matches, bo3 quals, more quals, all of those are far worse than what we have now. I guess we just have to deal with it, it isn’t your fault you didn’t rank as you should’ve, but that’s just how it goes sometimes.
I think what we’re frustrated about is the disconnect between performance and rank. The point of the qualification rounds are to put teams in order of performance, which didn’t happen at this event.
While there may be some element of luck, given the analysis of Eliminations I posted recently, the Qualifying rounds seem to do a reasonably good job of sorting teams. At least as good as the NCAA Men’s basketball season.
While rankings do have a bit to do with luck, I can’t think of a better way to do alliance selection. If you have bad luck then try to qualify off of skills, excellence, or another award that qualifies. Even if the first seed was not very good, everyone had the ability to either accept or decline them and since the top 9 declined they had the same disadvantage that the best teams couldn’t pick eachother. Not trying to be mean or anything but if you want to rank higher, make your robot or auton better. There are some situations where it’s basically impossible to carry, but if you have a robot that’s far more competitive than all the other robots, you’ll qualify.
This is why I like skills, if you truly are the best than you can qualify through skills with no luck involved. if your skills run fails, that’s on you, not on any partner or opponent or ref, all you and your bot.
I also like skills for this reason, but VRC would be rather boring if it was just the skills challenge. Alliance selection is a really interesting strategy mechanic, and while there of course is always some luck involved, what it looks like to me is that the team which ended up ranked at the top out-strategized the team in question. VRC isn’t just about the robots that you built and programmed before coming to the event; that’s what the judged awards are for. The tournament side is largely about strategy and predicting what other teams will do and knowing how you will respond.
It’s not that team’s responsibility to make sure your alliances don’t get screwed up.
I’ve taught my teams that if they’re in a situation where there are multiple teams below them that would decline, they would pick multiple top teams knowing that they’d decline, preventing them from selecting each other.
It’s strategic, impersonal, and is what you use to win. That’s the nature of the game.
While you can do that, dont expect other teams to like you. I know a team which is disliked by everyone because they always try to mess up the top teams.
While you can do it, try to minimize how many times you do it, otherwise you might get on the bad side of everyone else.
My teams aren’t responsible for hurt feelings because of what happened in the schedule or when picking alliances. I coach them to be professional, cordial, and friendly to everyone. What do you want teams in that position to do? Just fall victim to accepting the entitlement of some of these teams just because they feel they’re better and they didn’t rank as high? Forget that.
Why not break up top alliances? It’s a competition; you play to win the game. Just because the top teams are mad they can’t play with each other is not the responsibility of my team. They’re there to win and play for as long as possible.
I’m not too concerned about getting on someone’s bad side. At the end of the day, it’s robotics.
I’ve been around for far too long to be concerned about teams getting mad because Team A broke up Team B + Team C power alliance.
I have to admit though, regardless of how qualifications work there almost always will be a natural order to teams who not live up to their rank. Granted there are times this does not happen, but for the most part this does happen in these scenarios. A team will get denied until they get accepted by a team of relative or lower caliber to them.
I just qualified for worlds with a claw bot and wasn’t carried either and I was 7th seed and picked 50th seed and like we qualified for worlds cause i knew they just had a really bad day when it came to luck
driver skills would probably go before programming skills because many teams don’t have an auton and there would be a lot more variation with driver skills. That being said, they would probably make the total skills score the second tiebreaker, and Sp the last tiebreaker.