[cmrnpizzo14]

I appreciate the GDC making this change as I believe that it will increase the level of play. While human player shots are exciting, most people have seen a hammer throw sometime in their life. Successful climbs are not commonplace and probably would be more entertaining to watch. Some of those HP's throw hard! Disks slamming into those walls can't possibly make lining up a climb easy. I was not behind the driverstation at a week 0 event, but just from being on the sidelines I definitely diverted part of my attention to the flying disks. I don't think I could line up a climb as quickly with the disks slamming into the wall in front of my face.

Also, I really don't think that this detracts from the value of any 'bots that teams might have made. I hope 1671 will let me use theirs as an example (again, thank you for joining us in Galileo last year). Full court shooters seem fairly prevalent. Even the best will not be able to make them all. If I were a team with a full court shooter (that will probably dominate qualifying rounds, I think we can assume that this will be true for the first few weeks at least), the first team that I would want is one with a floor pick up. A second full court shooter probably wouldn't do me any good as I would already be preparing to shoot all of my disks. I would want the "clean up bot" if you will to gather all of my misses and score them so that our alliance is almost guaranteed to score all 45 of the alliances white disks. Also, a floor pickup would help get me the extra AUTO points that would give me the edge over another full court shooting alliance. I believe that a floor acquiring 'bot would probably be the top pick at most regionals, possibly second only to a 30 point climber with a dumper.

I don't believe that any team should feel slighted by this at all. If it comes down to it and you still want to get your finale cycles in, just score the 6 colored disks that your HP throws. Honestly, I see 2 cycles as being ambitious even for the best teams. 6 disks, relative to 8, is not a huge loss. Heck, if you can even score them in the pyramid goal, that gives you an advantage.

I understand why teams feel as if they were cheated by the GDC, but I really think that this will just add to the number of successful climbs and only slightly decrease the number of acquired disks during the endgame but will make floor pickups more valuable during the first 3/4 of the match.