Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

The issue would be catching at the other end. The match could have safe zones at the other end but the robot toss could be interesting. But please tell us it's coming months before the build season....

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

Volleyball please. In the middle of the field is a giant net that extends all the way from the floor up to five feet. Enter X many balls and whoever has the most balls on one side of the field loses. Maybe also there could be holes in nets in certain places so you don't always have to go over. Not volleyballs though because they're somewhat hard and could possibly hurt people, maybe like Aerial Assist balls or soccer balls.

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

In GameSense last year when Frank was on the show, I think he said that Aerial Assist was originally a volleyball game that developed into AA (hence the truss).

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

I could get behind this.

Though real time scoring would be ridiculously difficult. Even counting the final score (assuming even hundreds not billions) would take several minutes.

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

Hockey

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

Maize Craze but with ping pong balls and bowling balls. That is all.

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

I'd like to see a cross of FRC robot with a implication of a EV3 and a FTC robot to accomplish a side task, through something in the main game that would make the robots Battle more i.e hit/collide more, so that there is more of a need for pushing power, Which gives me an idea... make it a game were your robot has to push like 200-300 pound crates to a certain objective, of have a game like king of the hill. those are my ideas lol :)

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

Forget water games. Do you really thing FIRST is going to risk foundation damage by putting several thousand gallons of water on the floors of high school gymnasia at districts? FIRST is heavily invested in the roughly 27' x 54' field and 3 vs 3 format. The control system for 2015 was new, so don't expect any major changes there for three or four years. Carpet has been the primary surface except for Maize Craze and Lunacy, so I'll give that a 90+% likelihood for 2016.

According to my research, every even year has had spherical balls as the primary game pieces, going all the way back to Maize Craze in 1992. Zone Zeal (2002) and First Frenzy (2004) also had movable goals, and First Frenzy had two different ball sizes. Except for the endgame of FIRST Overdrive (2008), stacking or hanging game pieces has been exclusively an odd-year endeavor. I fully expect a return to defense, mandatory bumpers, and one or more thrown or at least throwable spherical game pieces for 2016.

It's been a while since robots could carry a lot of game pieces. This year there was no legal limit, but very few carried more than eight (a 42 point stack) at a time. The past three years had limits of four or fewer game pieces at a time. I didn't check the rules for Logomotion (2011), but from the videos it looked like robots carried one inner tube at a time. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a lot of relatively small balls in 2016, with no carry limit.

Within my team, I'm stumping for an off-season build of an autonomous robot that cleans up the balls from the tennis court and returns them to an open-topped box or bin; we should learn something useful for next year. And oh yes, tennis balls would be a nice 25th anniversary touch.

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

@GeeTwo:
Yes, yes, so much yes. All of the yes, in fact.

Every single nail has been hit on the head right here.

We are definitely due for ball-shaped game pieces again, and lots of them, without any limit on the number of game pieces that can be carried at a time. This combination of rules keeps coming back through the years, and for good reason; handling game pieces in bulk is a very different game challenge from handling them individually, and a good challenge at that (as long as you mix it up with a solid endgame and/or side objective). The last time we had a game like this was back in 2009, so there have already been two graduating classes of students who never got a chance to do this; we are definitely overdue, no doubt about it.

(And yes, I would definitely call out tennis balls / wiffle balls / similar-sized game pieces as a good idea, what with the 25th anniversary and all.)

As for the difficulty of accurate and/or realtime scoring with large numbers of small game pieces, I would propose that we take a cue from FTC 2015 "Cascade Effect" and measure your score based on the cumulative depth of game pieces scored in the goal(s) instead of attempting to count the game pieces individually.

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

2011 had a limit of 1 tube at a time. Any more and the robots would look drastically different (look at FTC's Ring it Up).

I agree with tennis balls being a likely game piece for next year. I find the challenges with a carry limit to be more challenging than those without that cap. Carrying 4 blocks or 5 balls (previous FTC games) was easy, but stopping that 5th block and 6th balls was the real challenge there.

I think tennis balls are a good choice because there hasn't been an FRC gamepiece small enough to get stuck in your robot. Coaching an FTC team this year we struggled with the little balls getting caught in small gaps in our robot. I think FRC could use that challenge.

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

My money is on a football-like game...it should be interesting!

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

We got Frisbees stuck in our hopper for Ultimate Ascent several times in practice; we managed to improve the mechanism before bagging.
I saw about a half dozen matches in which litter got caught in robots' lifts or wheels or can burglars this year, not counting videos.

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

As I recall, the real-time scoring for Ultimate Ascent was based on weight. If there were only one game piece, or there were very few "specials", or the scoring were directly proportional to weight, this could also work for a game with a great number of balls.

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

Sorry, should clarify. I meant game pieces that could find their way into any exposed nook and cranny of your robot. Frisbees would get stuck in places where frisbees were meant to go, and under robots, lifting them off the ground in rare cases. Litter would go into places you didn't want it to go, but that was more of a "defense" issue.

I was talking about pieces you want to manipulate ending up in random spaces in your robot. The kind where you wonder, "how did that get there?" My team had plenty of those moments (along with the occasional loose screw), and it made us really think of ways to better contain the gamepieces, as well as isolate the rest of our robot from them.

Re: Not to jinx next year, but...
 

Next year is also the 25th season of FRC so that is something to factor in...maybe?