[45Auto]

It's a very viable strategy. The problem is convincing the other two teams on your alliance to do it if they're not among the top half-dozen or so competitive teams at a regional. The majority of the students aren't even aware of how qualifying points are awarded.

I've found that the vast majority of high school students are convinced that their robots are scoring monsters, even though it's their 8th or 9th qualifier and they haven't scored a point yet. They're convinced that they've "adjusted" it in the pits and they're going to score 50 points this qualifier. They've spent 6 weeks building the thing, this is their only regional, they probably didn't even get to even run it before it had to be bagged, now they want to play with it!

It tends to make for an "exciting" low-scoring game with a bunch of robots driving around the field trying to score. Then in the last few seconds they try and fail to accomplish the function which would have easily won them the qualifier.