Strength points should be either based on the ccwm of the teams you are against or be based on the number of points you score.
I have seen this a lot in our region too, and I think a lot of teams are afraid of a sudden comback at the end of the match. We have come dangerously close to losing a match because we were trying for SPs.
Since we are still new to this, we have looked at SP. We went with 1 bot looking to keep them, and the other team just set out to win, no matter the SP. For us it was learning what happens, was their any true advantage or not. For now, we are happy being chosen in the top 8, if we are not. More often we are not top 8, and as long as we are top 24, and we have learned how to be better than the last run, its a win for.
That being said, the one tourney we won, we didnt care about SP. Finished 3rd in the qualifying round, and was picked up by the 1rst place team. The other team carried the lead until round 5 (the team that monitors the score). Round 6 and 7 were losses, and they finished 6th and was picked by the 2nd place team. The earlier of the two bots, had one the lowest SP of all the bots, but had 1 loss due to gremlins in the match. The driver was even asked by a ref, “Heard of SP?”
We also start aligning alliance partners long before the end. That has been the biggest help to us, looking for bots that compliment our style of play, and bots.
Here is what I noticed, SP are important to those top tier teams that have lots of time invested. We will get there, for us we are not there YET. Low SP showcases what our bot can do, we can clear the field. We can keep it clean. Because no one knows who we are.
One reason I like SP scoring is that in easy matches you just need your serious mode on for like 15 seconds of driver control and then switch to an “eh” mode for the rest. It conserves your energy for the eliminations.
That being said, sitting there doing nothing is really, really boring. The 0 SP dream sounds like a nice thing to pursue… If rankings didn’t matter… APs kinda helped change stuff up but kinda didn’t at the same time (they’re a nice addition though).
With APs this year, the SPs don’t matter nearly as much. But if there are other teams that can get perfect APs also then they matter much more. What you should do is make sure you have plenty of stars scored on your side but line them up in clumps of 5 or 6, so if the other team starts going you can easily outscore them.
I’ve actually noticed that if two good teams have equal WPs, more likely than not they will have equal APs.
At my last tournament, my team lost one qualifying match because we underestimated our opponent and stopped scoring early into the match. If we hadn’t lost that match, we would have gone undefeated and placed #1. If we had been the #1 team, we could have chosen a better alliance partner and possibly won the tournament.
So I agree that Strength Points are necessary, but I’ve seen firsthand how they can backfire on you.