1. Triple balancing will be difficult, if not impossible. Ove the entire time at Kettering, not a single alliance managed it. However, double balancing will almost always win the match in seeding matches, and helps enormously in elims.
2. The coopertition bridge is really dangerous. I saw at least 20 teams flip while trying it- much more than the alliance bridges.
3. A slow (shots per second), close range shooter mechanism is much more valuable than a powerful, inaccurate one. There simply aren't enough balls on the field to really allow an inaccurate shooter to thrive.
4. Lining up both power and direction in teleop is harder than one would think.
5. As an addition to 4, vision can be very useful- teams that could have the robot aim, even if it took 15-20 seconds, for them were much more effective.
6. Enough robots will have a bridge manipulator that a small subset of teams can survive without one, and still climb the bridge. You just need something else to make yourself useful
7. Have some way to tell if there is a ball under the bridge you are trying to press down. I saw many teams pushing against a ball again and again, only to have it push the bridge back up before they could get it low enough...
Personal note:
at Kettering, it was ruled that [G28] is transitive, same as pinning is. In other words, if blue robot A is touching the key, blue B is touching A, and red robot C touches blue robot B, they are in violation of [G28]. My team got called on that 3 times (same match), and when we challenged it afterwards the head referee said the above. We were REALLY ANNOYED, as it brought us from a tie to a loss. And this was after we had rolled down the coopertition bridge after a failed balance, to prevent the other team from falling off. And the robot on the key was dead, so it wasn't even like we trying to disrupt them... Does this sound correct to anyone else?