What Separates “Okay”, “Good”, and “Great”?
January 18, 2013 • ∞
I wanna be the very best
Like no one ever was
- Ash Ketchum
Most of our predictions have been decidedly gloomy. History shows that the typical robot just doesn’t score many points. It might average out to one score in autonomous, one in teleop, and an end game contribution every few matches. We like to talk about the typical robot because our target audience is the team that usually doesn’t play in the elimination tournament. Our goal is to show them that really a very simple robot can be quite competitive. In other words, the bar is set quite low.
It is worth noting though that elite teams are significantly better than average teams. Because we don’t want to explain OPR and we think alliance scores do a good job of demonstrating this, we are going to use them. In Rebound Rumble, the 95th percentile alliance scored about 3x as many points as the median alliance (47 pts compared to 17). If you look back to other games you find that this is not atypical. We think the multiplier may be even larger this year as climbing the pyramid is quite hard. In Rebound Rumble the 75th percentile alliance is over 1.5x as good as the median (28 vs. 17). In absolute terms this may not be huge, but for many teams to double the number of points they score can actually be quite difficult.
We think that building an FRC robot is just like a good FRC game. It isn’t that hard to be average, it’s difficult to be good, and it’s really quite difficult to be great. Deciding which level your team wants to compete on is obviously up to your team, but if you have traditionally struggled to be average, then aiming to skip straight to good may be a bridge too far.