Re: [FTC]: Defense vs. Gracious Professionalism
 

Another strategy I found was defensive, yet I, to be honest, think it is a "cheapshot" strategy:

In one of our matches, there was a robot's autonomous mode. We noticed it changed.

Normally, the robot would just proceed and go forward.

However, our robot had an autonomous that scored (Only maybe 4 or 5 robots at the tournament had a scoring autonomous). It seemed as if they knew how our autonomous mode worked, and they changed their code to go forward, then turn, then go forward, and "park" in our path. It threw us off by the way.

Re: [FTC]: Defense vs. Gracious Professionalism
 

Those programmers should be rewarded for their accomplishment of scouting ahead of their match, and being able to program on the fly accurately. I can think of numerous FRC matches that were won based off of similar autonomous mode strategies.

This promotes competition, if teams are able to stop your autonomous mode on the fly, the best teams will program scoring autonomous modes on the fly as well. Or potentially it will encourage use of sensors to extreme ways that the robot will know their is something in its path and is not able to score. Another possibility is to program multiple autonomous modes, and keep scouters guessing at which one will be used in the next match.

See how wonderful FIRST is?

Re: [FTC]: Defense vs. Gracious Professionalism
 

Gracious Professionalism may be a fuzzy little bonus of FIRST, but you can't withold a good strategy or a strong auto-mode because of it. As long as it OK'd by the rules, intense defense like dumping racks outside the field is not a "violation" of GP. You can't allow "Gracious Professionalism" to limit your strategy or Auto modes.