Re: ball corral block, good or bad?
 

At St. Louis they were giving penaties for the goal crossing the plain, at Peach Tree they didn't. Did FIRST relax the rules?

I do think it is a valid strategy and one that could determine the outcome of the match. This years game can be won with a lot of small balls and capping or by hanging (better yet, both). In watching the Midwest regional this weekend many of the highest scoring matches involved capped goals with lots of 5pt balls. If my memory is correct the 210pt. match was with only one robot hanging. 17 balls divided in two goals both capped, one robot hanging and a 10pt penalty. If someone had blocked the ball corals it would have been a differnt outcome.

My two cents worth!

P.S. The human players were using balls to push the goals out of the way at Peach Tree!

Re: ball corral block, good or bad?
 

That's probably the reason the penalties were being given out. Robots pushing the goals into corrals at the Buckeye weren't penalized.

Re: ball corral block, good or bad?
 

You musnt have seen the killer bees, emoticons, the fridge or any of the other ball collectiong teams in action. No bar naging needed for them to score high and dominate matches. especially if they or an ally of theirs can cap...
anyway, by the time of our regionals, pushing the goals with balls hadnt really happened yet(we went to VCU and Chesepeake). So that changes the game once again.

Re: ball corral block, good or bad?
 

Personally, I think it helped the game. For the most part, a robot that controls the platform, could stop several bar hanging robots from hanging (but not all). The same with the ball corrals, by "choking" the ball corrals with mobile goals (or robots), is another method to mess with another team's game/strategy (regardless if they are ball handling or not). There needs to be a balance in stopping other team from "doing their thing," besides pushing them around, or ramming them all day long, and integrating ball corrals into the game is a good call.

Re: ball corral block, good or bad?
 

Robots pushing goals into corrals were not penalized at New York either. But I did not see any teams using balls to push the goals away. However most of the penalties given were for robots or HPs crossing the plane.

Re: ball corral block, good or bad?
 

I don't believe there were any penalties for human-player-zone-goal-plane-breaking-robots at either UTC New England or Philly regionals. Our robot's super ball catching and collecting skills have won us a regional. Whenever a goal blocked the human player opening, we either went to the other opening or pushed the goal out of the way with our conveniently-placed-heightwise basket mechanism; and whenever there was a robot in the way we pushed it out of the way with our super-torquey-team-45-inspired drive train. So all in all, for our team, a goal in our way was not in our way for long, but against less powerful robots in our situation, the situation could have proven disastrous.
See you all in Atlanta! :D

Re: ball corral block, good or bad?
 

At the midwest regional, they didn't penalize for the goal going into the chute. Though I don't think it helped a lot...because there was always another chute. Unless the human player on the other side wasn't up to par.

Re: ball corral block, good or bad?
 

When Miss Daisy finally started working the way we hoped she would, we found that a both offensive and defensive strategy was required to win, it's only logical! For the offensive, we were able to hang and herd a decent number of balls. In the defense, we weren't afraid to play spoiler when it came time for opponents to try to hang. We also blocked a few corrals in our rounds. In our case, I think we really benefitted from the ability to block the ball corrals. It seemed to me like a cheap strategy at first, but I realized that we definitely weren't the first to implement the idea. So my opinion is that it's perfectly okay, and it makes for an EVEN MORE EXCITING game, if that's at all possible. I've seen quite a few pushing matches between large-quantity ball catchers and other robots. I love it.