Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

"Strategies aimed at and/or game play resulting in the damage, destruction or inhibition of opponent ROBOTS via actions such as high-speed or repeated, aggressive ramming, attachment, damage, tipping, or entanglement of ROBOTS are not allowed."

Is defense legal? Any effective defense inhibits a robot. Most defenders use "strategies" or "game play" that result in "inhibition of opponent ROBOTS" by "ramming". All defense is "repeated"; very rarely does a defending team only "ram" another robot only once. "Aggressive" is a subjective term, but I'd argue that all defense is aggressive. "Ramming" as opposed to pushing is also very subjective, especially if you collide with another team that's moving quickly. If this type of foul is called often, then I anticipate many upset teams and inconsistent refereeing.

EDIT: I feel this is quite a bit unfair to teams who, unlike the GDC, realized that in a full open field with no protected areas ramming and high speed collisions would happen a lot, and decided to build incredibly strong and robust robots with the ability to ram teams if they need to. I know there are teams who wouldn't have built their robot if the rule was like this.

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

Could someone explain what -"damage"- used the second time in the first sentence means? The one that comes after the word "attachment".

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

Anything the already overburdened refs manage to have time to watch between their other million things to do. Sorry guys, hope you all brought your second and third pairs of eyes.

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

If you remove the other ways to get the penalty, you end up with an incredibly redundant sentence.

Strategies aimed at and/or game play resulting in the damage of opponent ROBOTS via actions such as damage are not allowed.

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

That could be because the formatting of the actual update is not properly copied here.

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

Playing defense on a poorly assembled robot = automatic Technical Foul...lovely. Just what this game needed ::rolls eyes::

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

Thanks. I missed that.

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

According to the letter of this update, I could surround my robot in acrylic panels and draw technicals when people break them. As long as the acrylic doesn't exist solely to draw fouls (i.e. has sponsor stickers on it, "protects robot internals from damage") it's not illegal, just a bad design.

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

3-D print all the things!

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

Vice versa, does this mean a poorly assembled robot playing defense on a more powerful or fast machine that in an attempt to break out of a defensive hold is now causing the offensive bot to draw a foul or tech foul?

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

"In practice"

Please wait to declare how something plays out "in practice" until there are more than 0 qualification matches played with the current rules.

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

Only if it was caused by "high-speed or repeated, aggressive ramming"

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

If you want an effective defense, build a goalie bot, or modify your Robot to be one.
Worth more than all the rammings and deflections combined.
Blocking a 10 point shot with its attendant time penalty is a game changer.

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

Based on my experiences as a referee this year, Jared is making a pretty safe assumption.

Re: Unscheduled Team Update: 3-20-2014
 

Here's what I imagine could happen to the poor referees. A team is about to score and win, but a defense bot knocks the ball out of the robot by colliding with it, which "inhibits" them from scoring. After the match, the team will come up to the question box, say that we were "inhibited" because a robot came into contact with us more than one time (satisfying the repeated or high-speed part), and that it should be considered ramming if it was violent enough to knock the ball loose. The ref has to make the call if the robot was being "rammed" or not to decide the technical foul, which isn't an easy decision, especially if it's the final on Einstein...