User blog:RA2/Robot Wars Rankdown: Series 1

I've decided to take the suggestion of separating this by series. For those who missed the last blog post, this is a game where all the robots of Series 1 get ranked. Players take turns placing robots, starting at the bottom, and finishing at the top.

In each round, the leader will nominate a pool of robots, and then the rest of the players will, in order, choose one to cut. They will write a brief summary on why they're cutting that robot, and they will finish by choosing one robot to save (no need to explain your save decision). The cut robot is ranked at whatever is the lowest vacant position - so the first robot cut ends up in 36th place, then the next in 35th place...etc. The saved robot is safe from elimination, and cannot be nominated next round. After each player has had a turn, the last player nominates a new pool of robots, and the next round begins. This will continue until a pre-determined number of rounds has elapsed. Then, all participants privately rank the remaining robots (with explanations), and privately send me their ballots. The averages determine final ranking, up to and including number one. Here's a bullet-list of the game flow, in order


 * Player 1: Nominates 8 robots that he/she believes should be cut. Does not make a cut or save this round
 * Player 2: Cuts one of the 8 robots, explains why, saves another one of the 8 robots.
 * Player 3: 6 choices remain. Cuts one of the 6 robots, explains why, saves another one of the 6 robots.
 * Player 4: 4 choices remain. Cuts one of the 4 robots, explains why, saves another one of the 4 robots.
 * Player 5: 2 choices remain. Cuts one of the robots, explains why, saves the other.  Nominates 8 new robots, cannot nominate one of the 4 bots saved this round.
 * Round ends. Everybody shifts down one position, and Player 5 becomes Player 1. After we complete the specified number of rounds (some players may be the leader more than once), the aforementioned private voting occurs.

I'll be pretty open about the criteria you use to make your cuts, just a few rule & guidelines:
 * Try to insulate it to the series in question - we're strictly ranking the Series 1 incarnations of robots
 * No discussing how it was received by the fandom - you can call a robot overrated or underrated, complain about fanboys, etc, as long as that is not your only reason for cutting
 * No troll-moves. Everyone's entitled to their opinions, but if I see a move that's clearly intended to get a rise out of people or an individual, you will be booted.  Slots are very limited, do not take one unless you plan on taking this seriously.
 * No gaming the system. Do not nominate good robots with the intent of getting them immunity via a save.  Again, everyone's entitled to their opinions of what robots are good, but you are to make a list of 8 robots that you genuinely want to see ranked at the bottom - don't try to tell me you sincerely think something like a champion should be cut in Round 1.
 * You must have watched & be familiar with all episodes of the series in question - hard to rank if you don't know/remeber all the robots. The series is on YouTube if you need to refresh your memory.
 * Most importantly, have fun, and don't take it personally if a robot you like gets cut sooner than you want it to.

Signups & size
There will be 6 rounds, and 5 slots available, so that means four openings plus myself. This'll be first come first serve, so to keep things fair, first priority in Series 2 Rankdown will go to people who didn't play this one (There will be 7 openings in that one.) Please comments if you'd like to play, and your desired spot - you may choose whichever open position you like - I've given myself 1 just for ease of getting things started. Thanks, and have fun!

1) RA2

2) CrashBash

3) Toon Ganondorf

4) Jimlaad

5) Jacobcranmer

'''R A 2 ; aka Resetti's Replicas. ( My Talk )''' 01:54, February 8, 2018 (UTC)

Boring Maths aka how I came up with those numbers
The number of players & rounds is determined by this formula, where z equals the total number of robots, x equals the number of players, and y equals the number of additional rounds beyond the first complete cycle.

x² + 2x + yx - y - 3 ≤ z AND y ≤ 0

With the aid of a graphing calculator, we determine the highest possible integer value of x, then take the corresponding y value and round it down to the nearest integer. When z=36, this works out to x=5, y=1, or 5 players and 6 rounds.

Spreadsheet
For a reference guide and progress tracker: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e2Eo5cBxvnfJlxyqTOuEPt2XzZVBOaYUJcqLN98QS7Y/edit?usp=sharing

Round 1
Let the game begin! CrashBash being player 2 will have the first crack at it. Then, the others will go in order of play - please do not jump the queue. Once Jacob has his turn, he will immediately pick 8 new ones, keeping in mind the 4 that get saved this round cannot be nominated again (and the ones that get cut are of course, dead.). I will get a spreadsheet up in Google docs when i get home from work, but we should be able to make some progress today.

RA2’s Nominees

 * Krayzee Tokyo #36
 * Sat’Arn SAFE
 * Shogun SAFE
 * Uglybot SAFE
 * The Blob SAFE
 * Detonator #33
 * Bugs #35
 * Psychosprout #34

36. Krayzee Tokyo (CrashBash)

 * WHO I AM CUTTING: Krayzee Tokyo.
 * WHY I AM CUTTING IT: These are all cutting floor robots to be sure, and in terms of actually being combat robots, they're all pretty much as bad as each other, so it's not like I can use that as a means of deciding on that matter. Statistically, Uglybot is the worst since it performed the worst. Objectively, Psychosprout is the worst because it simply can't function as a combat robot. But you know what? For what it's worth, those two have appeal. Like, you want to actually see them progress, you want to see how they'd do in the other challenges. They're actually quite memorable. So are all the others...even The Blob, for having such a generic name and design, had an entertaining team. Krayzee Tokyo just didn't do that for me. It looked very off-putting, performed badly and frankly, the team was very unmemorable. The name is cool, but that really doesn't save it. Not to mention it looked like the robot was slowly folding in on itself. I hope this reason is acceptable.


 * WHO I AM SAVING: SAT'arn.

35. Bugs (Toon Ganondorf)
CUT: Bugs. Remember when people wanted to vote it to beat a heavyweight walker? The machine came second last in Gauntlet, second last in trial, and lost in seconds with Cunning Plan. Honestly, all you have to do is read the design section of its own article It was made of wood and a vacuum cleaner, which even Vector of Armageddon didn't have going against it. Control issues throughout its heat, a faulty castor which prevented it from driving in a straight line, and unreliable speed controllers.

Saving Shogun

34. Psychosprout (Jimlaad)
Cut: PSYCHOSPROUT. As much as I like the robot for being so out there and bonkers, it really wasn't that competent for anything. To be honest, we should be using The Ultimate Free Pass as a template for the bottom of these lists. Once we're past all of them the discussion ramps up massively. Anyway, Detonator and Uglybot are ultimately more likely to win fights and/or trials/gauntlets than Psychosprout if they all went and reran 100 times.

Save: THE BLOB (Shoutout to TG for saving Shogun. It's nowhere near bad enough to be in the bottom 8 of the series)

33. Detonator (Jacobcranmer)
Cut: DETONATOR. I understand that Detonator did better than Uglybot, but, in my opinion, it shouldn't have. Detonator, much like its successor Napalm, was not well constructed, and, in my opinion, just not practical. I think if it came down to it, Uglybot would definitely advance farther than Detonator, and is certainly the better robot.

Save:UGLYBOT

Jacobcranmer’s nominees

 * Elvis #32
 * Plunderbird 1 SAFE
 * Cruella
 * Nemesis
 * Scrapper
 * Eubank the Mouse
 * Grunt
 * Wharthog

32. Elvis (RA2)
I’ll stick with my original choice

Cutting: Elvis.

In reviewing the nominees’ pages, I found a compelling argument to spare most of these bots, but when I looked up Elvis, here’s what I found. One, its lifter can’t lift its own weight. And two, despite raising its shell for the gauntlet to give it better clearance, it was still too low to handle the ramp. Apart from a beetle at last year’s Robogames, I cannot think of any bot that used a scissor-lift style lifter, and it’s probably not a coincidence.

Saving Plunderbird 1