Quote:
Originally Posted by WizenedEE
Was your team planning on getting red and yellow cards in your strategy, and was counting on your alliance to not lose points when you did so?
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Would it be fair to say that my team wasn't planning on having to actively discourage alliance partners from violating the recently-amended rules?
I can concede that in this sort of risk calculus, one should factor in the possibility that FIRST will change the rules—but knowing that something like this
could be changed isn't at all the same as being enthusiastic when that change is made.
Quote:
Originally Posted by WizenedEE
And anyway, it's never too late to make the rules harsher, doesn't gracious professionalism say that you shouldn't try to break rules? Especially with red and yellow cards.
I think they added it to discourage teams from encouraging alliance partners from getting a yellow/red card if it's a "good cause"
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One could speculate that's roughly why they added it—to prevent teams from collaborating to employ a strategy where they break a pile of rules in their last qualifying match (and get carded for it), causing another team to drop in the standings, in exchange for getting picked by some other team in the elimination rounds. (Doing another team's dirty work.) I'd say that while this is probably a shady tactic that will earn the participating teams a whole lot of scorn, there's really no need to disincentivize it with half-measures like penalties—that only hurts the violator's alliance partners (who may well be completely uninvolved).
Or maybe they wanted to make sure that teams don't provoke their opponents into being carded (<G61> doesn't apply if there's no penalty). I see that sort of provocation as being a fairly legitimate strategy—because it's a team's own responsibility to avoid violations, irrespective of the trickery of their opponents.
But maybe the most likely case would be that FIRST simply overlooked that aspect of the penalty structure, and wanted to remedy the omission. In that case, maybe the lesson to be learned is to proofread early and often?
Basically, someone presumably made a determination that the benefits of amending the rules outweigh the detriments of subjecting teams to those same amendments at this point in the season. I don't really see a combination of circumstances that would justify a change with relatively little practical effect upon the behaviour of offenders, but which imposes additional burdens (relatively minor, though they may be) on the rest of the teams at this late date.
Edit: As updates go, this isn't really worth any outrage, and it's by no means one of the most significant rule changes in the history of FIRST. It's really only the inauspicious timing that makes it worth commenting upon—this is more than six weeks into the season, after all.