An Overview of the Game
 

Now that the official competition season has ended, what are your thoughts on the game? What aspects of the game do you think were well balanced or too weighted. What scoring/rule changes would have made the game more interesting? Overall, what do you think made the game better or worse than it could have been?

I don't think we'll be seeing an undefined tether rule again any time soon.

I feel bad for the teams that engineered a good extendor or mini-bot and felt cheated by those that slapped on a tape measure. Ditto for the refs from different field making very subjective calls on the tethers. Imagine how the game would have been different if the rule had been better defined or not there at all.

I do think that they did a good job a creating a fun to watch game.

This was my first year. Do you think they will retain the field dimensions for next year? How drastically has it changed year to year in the past? I heard about last year's being a bit confusing to spectate and score.

Most importantly, how similar is the kit of parts and add'l hardware list year to year? I was planning on working with the kids thru the year by doing a motorized cart and better pit layout. The idea being to sharpen CAD skillls (theirs and mine) as well as experiment with some tranny designs. Of course, in the spirit of garcious professionalism, only ideas would be carried into the 6 week build session.

I honestly think that this year was the last year for scoring by placing your robot in a zone. Because of the tethers, it created lots of problems.

We have been using basically the same field layout for the past three years. FIRST has made it rather clear that they want to continue using this field layout to help reduce costs (for both themselves and teams that build a full field). As far as the kit of parts goes, most of the parts stay the same. However, there are some variations every year (like this year we got Chipua motors and not Van door motors).

Matt

Don't feel bad for us - the well engineered extenders were much more reliable and difficult to stop than the slapped-on tape measures.

In the finals of the Archimedes division, 25 and 118 both relied on their mini-bots to win it for them, and both mini-bots came through like champs. I wouldn't want to trust the division championship to a flimsy tape measure.

what i thought was a good idea is how the game was designed to have only 3 goals on the field and 4 robots. next year though i want to see some 2v2v2 that would make things very interesting. another thing. why balls the last few years? how about dense foam pyramids or cubes?

Team 535 also followed the rules as to tether. We had a pair of assemblies where we spooled out a 22 foot long by 7 inch wide piece of lexan. We could score in both zones while having our bot on the field. We called tham the tongue and tail (TnT for short). The two assemblied weighed a total of 22 pounds. The first thing we considered was a tape measure but we decided it would be an entanglement risk. We could have found a better use for that 22 pounds if the tether rule was as lax, in the beginning, as it was toward the end of the season.
Another pet peeve I have with this years game is changing the rules from qualification rounds to the final rounds. The elims required strategy, the finals, for the most part, required battlebots. IMHO the rules should have stayed the same.

Just my $.02 worth

Wayne Doenges

And with the new aluminum field structure they had made up this year, I think it's safe to say there's at least a few more years in the current field shape...