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Didn't make many friends this year...
Great point, Andy (and boy, are you up early this morning!).
I'll be the first to admit that we didn't make many friends this year. Our robot was pretty unique (only a few others like it) so the strategy to use our robot properly is different than the way most of the teams play the game (not extremely different, but different enough). This caused us to have to be pretty forceful at times when strategizing before matches. I really didn't like this part of the game. Every Friday at the competitions I remember feeling like I couldn't wait for the day to get over. I was dreading going to the matches because I really don't like being a jerk, but my company put in a lot of money and my teammates put in a lot of time, and myself and Kevin owe it to them to produce the best results possible.
It seems that the intent of this game is to give everyone this warm and fuzzy feeling that we're all friends working together. A lot of the people that I talked to mentioned that this was amongst the worst games thus far in terms of accomplishing these intentions. It seems that more often that a warm fuzzy feeling, people left feeling that they were let down by other teams, other teams broke promises, there were hard feelings in strategy discussions, and some teams are just plain overbearing and dictatorial. In summary, this game was hardly the love fest that it was intended to be. I think the most spoken words in FIRST this year were, "we're sorry", and I don't want a game to be that way.
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