21st place in the finale comp at ALANTA.
21/100 We should have been picked… 
good job 
How was the “environment” there.
What did alliance captains use to make their picks? I know you guys weren’t insanely good; but I agree that you did well. In my scouting reports from the Thursday matches (gotten by keeping one eye on the webcast) I noticed that you scored well and have a good autonomous (more than two balls) that worked at least once.
You would have been on my list of teams to check out carefully (in fact you were in the list I sent to the 3317 mentors).
Did the captains seem to be using careful notes, or using any written material?
Did they seem to be trying to pick robots with similar or with complementary features?
Were students making the rounds of the pits sizing you up, or selling their own team’s capabilities?
I’m just curious, in general, how much of crap shoot the draft was.
Blake
Congratulations. Our team has only been to Atlanta once. As far as I know, it didn’t go too well.
Does anyone know where I could find videos of the Vex Atlanta matches?
Scouting was hard for the FVC I think. I was the leader of the 5th ranked team so I got to pick alliance partners. We were beat out in the quarter finals due to, I think, bad alliance choseing. I think the problem was that some robots were inconsistent and the info I got from scouts wasn’t great. But I think it was hard for them to get info from the teams themselves. A lot of teams never seemed to be in their pits.
I was honestly very surprised at your first pick. I’m not trying to put them down or anything, but I didn’t feel that the Zip Tis were first round material. I would have though you would pick 3197 or 3228, or even 3050. But you guys also had the terrible luck of playing 1114 first.
Yes 1114 was extremly hard to beat. I picked the zip ties because I understood from my scouts that they had been handling the atlas ball and hanging all day/s long. They didn’t do either when they were out there. 3197 I would have never picked because since they were our sister team I could see how they worked together, and they din’t work together well at all. I was told 3228 SPAM was not the team I wanted to pick by my scouts, they never mentioned why… So next year we will definitly have to get a new system. Anyways we still had fun and that’s what counted.
As the team mentor of Radnor Robotics let me stress that Everyone Rules! Atlanta was a great competition and everyone seemed to have a good time.
I think what DREAD meant to say was “I wish we were picked”, becuase we were a consistent robot with much to offer. Our neighboring school’s team Dawgma -1712 was 4-0 and ranked 12th and was not picked.
Sometimes you have to ignore the ranking and see how well the robot performs. The 7th ranked alliance captain JAWS selected an 0-4 team(FLAME) and made it all the way to the finals. FLAME really played well scoring alot while JAWS played defense.
Good scouting is crucial when selecting an alliance but is not an easily learned skill. You have to concentrate how well the team performs their strategy. In two of our matches our job was to get the Atlas ball. So that is what we did. We spent most of the match pinning the Atlas Ball against the playing field. Boring but effective.
There were so many good teams down there that it was tough to keep track.
I can’t wait till next year’s challenge.
As Ken said it was hard to chose from the teams because they were all good. With only 4 matches the official rankings weren’t much use either.
As the Team Leader of 3228, we played lousy on Thursday. We took an overnight bus trip to get to Atlanta, and the lack of sleep affected the team. We made poor decisions. We set-up the robot wrong twice, once alligning poorly in auto mode and once forgetting to ensure that the robot was together correctly to pick up balls. There was another match where we may not have put a fresh battery in - I’m still not sure. We played better on Friday morning, but only had one more match to show anything.
We were lucky to get picked, but we played the quarterfinals (beating the #1 alliance) and the semifinals (losing to Occam, Simbotics, and EMP) like we were capable of playing. I even had a team from the #1 alliance ask where we came from, as we didn’t show that capability on Thursday.
Scouting was nearly impossible with so many teams and so few matches. This must change for the future! 4 qualifiers was not enough. We were able to see 12 teams out of the 99 during our matches.
Yeah no offense or anything my scouts specifically told me not to pick you guys but after seeing how well you performed in the finlas I was a little upset. I think scouting is still evolving in the FVC.
Yea, alliance picking is a pretty hard process. Its not always the best robot being picked but the robot who works best with their alliance partners. I learned that the hard way when we were told by both the #7 and #3 alliance captains that they would pick us but in the end past us by. I still feel like our robot was good enough to al least be picked, but with a 1-3 record (due to the crystal problem) I would have probably done the same thing.
I told my scouts not to work off of the official rankings due to problems like these^, but it didn’t seem to help, anyways we all make mistakes hopefully we learn from them.
We had minimal scouting capability, but we did get to see every robot in at least two matches. By far the biggest problem, however, was people and camera-men on the field obscuring what was occurring.
The overhead video-feed was mostly closeups, so you could not see all that was happening. I think that I would have preferred a fixed view from a high-angle. The numbers for several teams were also very difficult to read (need to enforce that rule a little better) which made it more difficult to track–particularly when the numbers were partially obscured.
To do a totally complete job with this, you would need to have 4 people watching every match–tracking individual scoring by robot–and then someone entering all the data.
I think some teams did this. Are any of them here? Did it work well?
–Bill Wiley
Coach
Vexy Things (#3549)
Our team is seven members. The two drivers and coach spent all their time competing or hanging out in the pits talking to judges. The other four of us spent the entire two days watching all of the matches. (Not all of four of us watched every match, but some of us did I believe.)
The method we used was to collect quantitative data on the first 25 matches. Then collect quantative data on the next 42 matches (that is, the rest of the matches for Thursday) on just the robots that were particularly good. That night we spent 1.5ish hours in our hotel discussing which teams we wanted to look closer at. On Friday we wrote down qualitative notes/observations on the rest of the matches. Right after lunch we went to the Congress Center and found a nice quiet spot and spent 45ish minutes creating our list of the top 11 teams we would pick. We ended up picking two robots from our top five: 1114 and 3230.
We tried to have a system in which 4 people would keep track of a robot in every match and then a 5th person would enter it into a computer. The problem we ran into is that the students who were supposed to be working on it would not show up or make up an excuse why they shouldn’t have to do it. I can post the excel spreadsheet we used if anyone cares to see it. IT would have worked well with a lot of people to take turns and who were dedicated.
I agree that the video feed wasn’t great, it seemed to be more of a addition for the people who were in the stands but if you were in the pits trying to see what was going on it was nearly useless.