Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe (Post 1382268)

I honestly don't see how this is different than any other year. If your complicated mechanism isn't reliable you aren't going to want to use it any year. Last year teams built climbers and only focused on that phase of the game, did they only reach for the low hanging fruit then? Every year the bane of some of the lower tier teams is reaching too high when they don't have the resources to succeed at it.

Originally Posted by Pault (Post 1382173)

For all the people that claim Arial Assist raised the floor:

The floor did not have better robots this year. They were just rewarded more for doing less. I would not call that raising the floor. In fact, it actually lowers it in some senses, because:

a) Teams were encouraged not to use some of their more sophisticated mechanisms because they weren't reliable enough

b) If this type of game continues, teams will start to realize that they should not strive for lofty goals, and instead simply grab the low hanging fruit and get tons of driver practice. I know my team had a lot of people who really pushed to have a defense/assist robot, even though we were fairly confident in our ability to build a shooter. This limits teams and doesn't really help FRC get more competitive.

Now, don't misunderstand me and think that I want the lower tier robots to be unable to score points. It's critical that they are able to feel important to their alliance. But we need to make sure that we are always incentivising teams to go for more difficult strategies, instead of making it so that only 1 robot (usually) can be the finisher and 1 robot (usually) has to be a dedicated inbounder/defender that never shoots the ball.