Please read this.
(this has already been a bit discussed before in the following thread:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...threadid=15969
but I wanted to post a poll, because if most people agree we can contact FIRST. <--
This is a bad part of this year's game:
If you win, you receive <edit>your points and</edit> twice the loser's points. But to do that you have to spend precious time worrying about making the opponent score less, and not letting the opponent bother you. That's maybe the biggest difficulty of the game: your two opponents.
If you talk to the "enemy" alliance before the match and set that you are going to tie in a very high score, then you don't have opponents anymore: you have 3 allies. Just like in 2001.
It will be easy to do an excelent score with half of the boxes and one robot at the platform, and you won't need to worry about the opponents bugging you: they will HELP you to do the same score. And then you get your score PLUS their score, wich will be A LOT of points and it
won't be a very difficult thing to do.
When some teams realize that that's the best way to score points and start doing it several times, watching and playing the game won't be fun anymore.
Think about.
I can imagine people saying "they won just because they rigged their matches! that's not fair with us! that's not gracious professionalism!"
And the other people will say "there's no rule against doing that!".
To prevent us from this big problem, we could ask FIRST to set some tiebrakers through an update.
Examples of tiebrakers:
1-Highest stack
2-Most robots on the platform
3-Most scoring boxes
4-Most boxes on your side of the field
5-Flip of a coin
Or any other way FIRST wants.
If we don't do something before it's too late to change, the teams that manage to convince the other 3 teams will be in advantage of points, and the ones that are against that and in favor of "fair play" will be more likely to loose.