[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

Positive:

More elaborate games
:
Insanely cool and complex robots

I like this line of thought. Games played over multiple years could have significantly more complex cooperative game objectives (ie. tasks that require 2 or 3 robots with potentially unique designs to accomplish). In prior games that I have participated in, cooperative objectives have been fairly "simple" (ie. robot elevation in 2007, suspending from another robot in 2010). In the first year, teams would initially focus on optimizing for the single robot objectives within the game while advanced teams would also start to incorporate capabilities for objectives requiring 2-3 robots to complete. Because the density of robots capable of cooperating at competitions would be low, these events would be rare in year one. In years 2-3, these events would become more common as teams master single robot objectives and move on to the cooperative objectives. Assuming that three unique designs are required to obtain a single game objective, then we could see designs that specialize in one, two, and possibly all three and the combinatorial design possibilities are interesting to me. The trick would be in carefully balancing the points between the layers of cooperation.