Quote:
Originally Posted by XaulZan11
I'm not sure this is a direct comparison. The 469's robot was hard to come up with and hard to design/build. Not every average team could have done it. The fact that there was one amazing team (and maybe 2 other very good teams with 51 and 125), that had the design makes it different. We have already seen/heard about countless teams that have sucessfully built full field shooters. Seems too easy for a potentially huge payout.
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I agree 100%. The two situations really are different.
469 in 2010 executed a fundamentally innovative strategy that many teams wouldn't have been able to execute even if they had come up with it. It's not like no one thought of shooting from the feeding station this year, there were threads about it from the very first days of build season. That many teams have (apparently) executed this strategy proves that it is not extremely difficult.
Is it a good thing for FRC? I don't really think so. There will be a lot of these shooters, and if they are as common as they seem on CD, it seems like most matches will have one. Is watching a robot line up and do one repetitive task match after match really inspiring? I like seeing robots that drive around and pick up things. Opinions, of course, will differ on this point.
If they did decide that they wanted to "stop" full court shooters, what could Manchester do? They could make climbing worth a lot more, encouraging teams not to spend all the match at the feeder station and to make the shooting points worth a lot less. They could give penalties for staying at the feeder station more than, say, 20 seconds. They could also make all robots shoot from in front of a certain point.
But FIRST won't decide this. They tend to really want counterintuitive strategies to succeed, and do a lot to encourage strategic creativity. In any case, full court shooting was so clearly legal at the beginning of the build season that I don't think that they can do much in good faith to prevent it at this point. We shall see.