I’m not sure when I’ll start switching the site over to Spin-Up; certainly by the first Spin-Up tournament in the US, possibly as soon as the first Spin-Up tournament world-wide. I’ll still have the data, and I will probably “seed” next year’s TrueSkill based on the results from the 3 World’s tournaments from Tipping Point. This will give at least a little bit more data for cross-region comparisons. I feel pretty confident that a team that makes World’s one year will have substantially the same membership the next (aside from graduating seniors).
First off, huge congratulations to PiBotics and CheesyPoofs (254F) for winning the World Championship. Huge props to every team that made the Dome:
House Cats ( 9257C )
U.S.S.R ( 4154X )
Rawr Vex Dee ( 4478E )
Pay Respects ( 3796F )
Quantum Zima ( 917Z )
Skywalker ( 980S )
Jugglenauts ( 100A )
DiscoBotZ ( 44777U )
HRS Robohawks ( 8000A )
I’M BACK ( 2114X )
Asymmetrical ( 2011A )
Exobytes ( 80708X )
Paradigm ( 315Y )
DVHS Robotics ( 5776E )
Crazy Train ( 2011C )
Endgame ( 2647X )
System Overload ( 51581S )
Overclock ( 16099B )
Amazing skills scores, especially our Top 3:
Endgame ( 2647X )
Skill Issue ( 16868K )
Paradigm ( 315K )
Congratulations to the judged awards winners as well - that is fantastic recognition.
Teams that attended - I hope you take time to look back and see how much you accomplished this season. Making World’s is not easy. Hopefully experiencing it gives both satisfaction in your achievements and motivation to be better next year!
World’s was a lot of fun - really great production quality, amazing matches, fantastic people! Great job RECF and Vex!
With the season now ended, I’d be curious what @Grant_Cox , @Sidoti , @Jon_Jack and others on / near the GDC thought of the season, especially:
Was the season success rate (8.84%) for AWP higher, lower, or close to what they expected?
Were there strategies that emerged that surprised the GDC (aside from anything SG3 related)?
Were there strategies / gameplay that the GDC envisioned that did not come about?
Is it true that the GDC thought about “retiring” SG3 from all future rules (e.g. sequencing SG1, SG2, SG4, …)?
In spite of all the consternation SG3 had, I still think this was a fun game to play. My initial reads of Spin Up rules lead me to believe it is better designed than Tipping Point and will be even more fun!
Wait, you’re the person who made the VRC Data Analysis website??! Thank you so much!!! It’s been so helpful to compile a list of how well teams have done over the year and find videos for specific matches.
I haven’t had much time during Worlds to visit the forum, but I had a few people mention this thread to me here, and I really like these questions. I will try to find time after the event to put together a longer answer, but in short…
AWP % - In the ballpark, maybe slightly low in my personal opinion, but I think this opinion might vary depending on who you ask or in what context. Since you’re here… I would be very interested in the % comparisons between league events, normal qualifying events, Signature Events, State/Regional Championships, Worlds divisions, and Worlds overall finals.
Strategies we didn’t expect - Yes, and this is pretty much always the case. The collective creativity of several thousand strategists approaching the same problem will never cease to amaze me. My personal favorites that popped up near the end of the season were the “ring moat” moves, and 254F using the Neutral Mobile Goal to help brace their Platform in the finals.
Strategies we thought we would see more of - Yes, and this is often the case. Once design convergence starts to happen over the season, it starts to quell many of the outside-the-box ideas (even if this was one of the better years in this regard). The two major examples that come to mind are the “dodgeball line” chess game in auton, and unique High Branch mechanisms (a la 2114X).
Retiring SG3 - jokingly, but not seriously, and honestly I think this rumor started elsewhere and was asked before we ever joked about it ourselves. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that very few people (who are not Head Refs or GDC members) will remember SG3 a few years from now. Anyone remember SG10 from In the Zone?
I’ll see what I can do; in manual inspection of the data, I think there were definitely some regional differences - for example, I think Louisiana had very few teams (if any) that had AWP, while other regions had higher incidents of it.
That’s fair. Though I think I will forever associate the sight-and-sound of Ryobi air compressors with Tipping Point; too bad they weren’t a sponsor, I’m pretty sure Vex drove a lot of sales their way!
Over the course of the season, the AWP success rate held pretty steady, which is somewhat surprising to me. I would have thought that it would have started low and increased before flattening off. Not so:
There was widespread regional variation, where Louisiana had a success rate below 1%, while states like Ohio and Indiana were above 14%. Interestingly, only 15 regions had AWP success rates above the global average of roughly 9%.
Regions that had Signature Events such as California (7.88%), Wisconsin (12.4%), Ohio (14.2%), Indiana (15.6%), Texas (10.3%), Georgia (4%), and Massachusetts (14.9%) generally had higher than average AWP with Georgia being the outlier. Not sure that correlation = causation there, but an interesting correlation nonetheless.
Considering how “easy” we forumers thought AWP would be at the start of the season, a 9% success rate would have surprised pre-season Mentor355v - I think I would have pegged it at 20%. Perhaps testament to the strategic choice of “AWP or Goal Rush”. That said, a 9% success rate seems like a good target (maybe slightly higher 12.5% would be 1 out of 8 matches). It will be interesting to see how things play out with Spin Up; at first glance the AWP seems much harder to do a Solo AWP than it was for Tipping Point - it’s a really long drive between the two rollers.
I don’t think the awp success rate being low is a matter of its difficulty, but rather the nature of the task conflicting with the winning strategy for the game. In order to win competitive matches, rushing the neutral goals during auton was absolutely essential. And it was very important to do this as quickly as possible. Which meant that doing AWP was always secondary in competitive matches, and often impossible, because in goal rushes, robots would often get tied up in a tug of war, or knocked far off course, unable to properly return to the alliance goal and score a ring in it. And of course, the odds of getting back to your side and doing half the win point is cut in half if your partner has similar odds.
So many teams just couldn’t both do awp and win matches, if the match in question was competitive. This is why I think AWP was highest at a point early in the season, where good teams were far enough ahead of everyone else that they could run solo AWP routes and still win matches by ignoring the goal rush.
I’m not sure this is properly doing what the awp is meant to do, rewarding teams for having the programming ability to complete a moderately challenging task. It did seem to do this early season, but by the time it was a matter of getting awp or win the match, not both, it seemed like it more rewarded having a schedule fortunate enough to allow a team to run solo awp and not completely forfeit the match win. Though at the same time, I don’t know what else the awp task could have been, giving it to neutral goal possession would have been too easy early season, and would have just amplified the already too-high stakes of the goal rush in mid-late season. So this may have just been that the game itself had auton being too important and too single-strategy to properly give an additional reward for any task without it being punishing to unfortunate schedules.
I’m hopeful the AWP rate will be higher this season as going for it doesn’t seem directly in conflict with winning the match as it was for Tipping Point, and seems difficult but very possible to do solo.
The low AWP percentage is definitely attributed to the need to run rush programs during the 15 second auton to win a match. Eventually, even at worlds, I found most teams didn’t have an AWP program, but the ones that didn’t were insistent on getting it which greatly helped their rankings. I also found it interesting that the few teams that did have an AWP program had it for the left side but not the right which contradicted my vision of the right side being easier.
I think AWP should’ve had less effective on rankings given the game was definitely based around neutral goals being rushed for in the very beginning. We stayed relatively low in rankings till the end of the competition due to only having one or two matches where the winpoint was prioritized.
This seasons winpoint sounds much more difficult but there is not really anything that either alliance rushes for so most of the time will be spent getting AWP. As a result the percentage will most certainly increase, amongst better teams that can shoot discs.
Touching on vex u auton time (40 seconds), I think if HS and MS matches had slightly longer auton periods then AWP would’ve been much less rare.
I agree that awp looks to be more prominent this year, enough so I am a bit concerned at how valuable it is. Equal to a tie is potent. It is a bit more complicated of a task, but quite achievable. Even an emerging team can do the simple roller. It won’t be far into the season when many teams can make both their pre-loads and move to the other roller.
I expect awp to be quite common by mid to late season.
