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Re: Human players and FIRST games
So, in general I haven't minded the human player roles... Lunacy in 2009 was definitely an exception, though!
In Lunacy, the HP scored a very significant number of points! It certainly wasn't uncommon to see a team's HP scoring more than their robot... I think that should never be the case! The super cells were essentially just for the HP, as there simply was not enough time to consistently get them to a robot and have that robot score it. So, I certainly agree that Lunacy had too much HP involvement.
I don't think the HP involvement has been too large (besides Lunacy) in recent years, probably excepting 2004. My in-depth familiarity only goes back to 2003, unfortunately! So, I wouldn't say that FIRST has made this a trend, but I would certainly agree that 2009 involved too much HP influence on the results of a match.
2006 and 2007 come next in terms of HP influence, and I didn't think their effect level was bad... Then the HP could score, but their ability to do so was very minor - they primarily just supplied/regulated the game piece flow!
In 2003, 2005, 2008, and 2010 the HP has relatively little involvement... Overdrive saw the HP/RoboCoach only acting to direct in "auto" mode, Stack Attack only had the HP placing the configuration of blocks out in auto, Triple Play had the HP physically loading the robot with a game piece (as an easier alternative to the auto-loaders, essentially), and Breakaway had the HP returning game pieces. Even thought the HP could incur huge penalties in Breakaway, they only had this influence on the match on a relatively few occasions.
I think Logomotion lies somewhere in between those two sets... The HP has the opportunity to get tubes most of the way to the scoring zone (very helpful!) but can't actually score game pieces with anything akin to consistency - as far as I know, at least! ;-) They can definitely improve scores by performing particularly well; however, I don't think their influence is as large as 2006 or 2007.
So, I would say that even though the GDC put too much emphasis on Human Players in Lunacy and Raising the Bar, those are the outlies rather than the norm...
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Student: 2006-2010 (#1519)
Mentor: 2011-Present (#1519)
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