Chief Delphi - FIRST Rule Changes

Quote:

Originally Posted by RRLedford (Post 942661)

Bad analogies - these sports make no pretense of having balls come back into play in any type of an "equal opportunity" way. Breakaway is modeled on soccer. The soccer throw-in does not give any positioning advantages to the players on the field for either team. Hockey is similar to soccer - face offs have equal access to the puck. Are ya getting the picture yet?

So I'm a little confused. Yes, ball return is in favor the offense. But at least by my reading of the rules, the fairness of the game isn't supposed to come from ball return--it's supposed to come from the fact that each and every one of us could have tried making a looper, or any other type of bot for that matter. I say this because, to the best of my knowledge, the GDC/rules have never claimed that ball return should be basketball-like or soccer-like or hockey-like, etc, or equal opportunity at all. It seem to me it just has to be Breakaway (;)) and apply equally to the red and blue towers, which it does. Is that an incorrect interpretation?

Personally, if I were a looper who'd worked that hard to determine and implement the strategy, I'd consider changing the rule to be unfair. All of us had the equal equal opportunity to do it, so personally I see no reason to expect an equal outcome if we didn't take the same course. They, I presume (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong), chose that course based in part on the offensive advantage. Changing it now throws off their cost-benefit analysis in a way that affects them considerably more than the rest of the population. To me that seems more unfair than allowing them to take advantage of a rule that all of us could have attempted equally.

Now, would I like it if I could stop them? Well, that depends who's alliance they're on. :P But in all honesty, no, because I hope that one day when I help build an awesome gamebreaker, no one will change the game for me. Just my $0.02. If you'd like to see equal opportunity in ball return, more power to you, I'm just not sure it's actually in line with GDC intentions. (And I believe this is historically why rules are changed: to bring them more in line with their intention, not to reflect a change in their goal. I could be wrong, of course.)