[Joe Johnson]

I want to explain why I think this new ruling gives strong team control of their destiny.

A strong team (let me use Wildstang #111 as an example), will very likely build an elevator machine in light of the new rules (those of you in FIRST long enough to remember Torroid Terror, Ladder Logic and Coopertiion FIRST will know that for a while Wildstang's slogan was "it can go higher... ...no really... ..it can go higher" -- I suppose that the Torroid Terror Machine could easily lift a crate 16 ft a.k.a. 13 SHU's perhaps higher and this was with a 4ft limit on the robot hieght -- YIKES!).

With such a robot and some indexing software, a team can essentially give an opponent any multiplier they choose. As long as an opponent has 16 or so containers on their side of the field (this boils down to 8 additional to the 8 from the human players), a strong team can pretty easily give or subtract 50 points from an opponent’s score very easily.

Need to boost your opponent’s score a bit? Easy. Raise a single box 8 high to give them a quick 64 points.

Would you rather only give them 30 points? That's easy too, just raise the container 2 SHU's?

How about just 15 points? Run out of the scoring zone.

Need to give 44 points? Raise it 4 SHU's and race back into the scoring zone.

Need to reduce that 50 points for the two robots they’ve got sucked down to the HDPE surface? No sweat, push a few containers out of their scoring zone and lift one container 1 or 2 SHU’s higher than the number of remaining boxes.

Never has a single talented robot had their opponent’s score so firmly in their control and so easily adjusted.

Notice that it does not even really require much work by an alliance partner. For this reason, I think strong teams that play smart will end up on the top of the seeding charts very quickly.

To some extent, I think that is the way it should be, but I doubt many realized that this new rule interpretation would add to this outcome.

I think it will be a total disaster to watch this as my mom will be always asking me, “Why did they just do that?” But that is a message for another thread.

Joe J.