I think Ultimate Ascent is the best all-around game since the turn of the century. It was very exciting, and there were tons of strategic choices, and the robots looked different! While 2004 will forever be a person favorite, I tried to sell it a bunch of newer mentors and they told me it was too complicated.
Ultimate Ascent was easy to grasp for people that just showed up at the day of the competition.
The voucher & FIRST Choice were good additions, I'm sure FIRST has learned from this year and they will be even better next year. Getting additional free game pieces was awesome!
The level of play was definitely higher than I expected. Ri3D is probably partially responsible for this, but I think a big thing is that there were plenty of parallels back to 2012. Some of the lessons learned shooting in 2012 could be applied to this year. Frisbees are also a really spectacular game piece. Not very expensive, and very consistent to shoot and pickup.
FIRST can change a rule after the week zero scrimmages, and other than the immediate predictable "HOW COULD THEY DO THIS THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!1" thread on CD, the game still worked out fine. To be honest, I think the frisbee blizzard probably would have taken away from the game at weaker events where humans had a ton of frisbees to throw.
The bumper rules have gotten simpler while I've been gone, which is nice.
I also really liked the change to the perimeter rule. We came so underweight we put a bucket of lead onboard and still weighed less than 100 lbs.
It will be interesting to see if lots of teams have weight issues next year, particularly if we switch back to a bigger size.
The Wildcard system is definitely an improvement as well. Nice to see the finalists get a ticket to the championship when the winning alliance has teams that already have spots.
It was a great year to be back after taking a couple years off from actively working with a team.
