[vigkvagkv2]

My team (one person in particular) has done an incredible amount of number crunching with various strategies, and doing that, floor pickup is an ability that is a MUST to get the most points possible, but quickly becomes obsolete depending on the roles of your other alliance members. With our number crunching, we found that the highest scoring alliance, which also considered other team compositions and won almost every time against them, would include a feeder bot (one who got the tube from feeder station quickly and brought it to the alliance zone), a scorer bot (one who just sits in the alliance zone and hangs tubes brought by the feeder), and a balanced bot (one who picks up tubes from feeder station and hangs it). To make it easier to read without parenthesis: a hanger, a feeder, and a balanced bot. We codenamed this team "White Panda". To have the feeder and the hanger, the hanger needs to be able to pick up tubes from the ground (since bots can't "hand off" tubes to another). We were originaly going to do a feeder bot, but unfortunatly found little evidence of other teams being able to pick up off the ground. As such, we are considering switching to a balanced bot that picks up from the ground. Without other teams that go the extra mile and pick up from the ground, the best alliance (according to our numbers) can't possibly happen. In my opinion however, picking up off the floor is a useful skill in any case.