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Unread 14-05-2013, 16:50
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AKA: Allen "JAG" Gregory
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Re: The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

Quote:
Originally Posted by Siri View Post
In terms of competition though, I seem to have forgotten how we determined more time would change relative competitiveness of the top 1/2-1/3rd. The bottom rising I get: more time to cross-team mentor, maybe more mentors signing on...but the top? We seem to have spent most of this thread talking about how the elite and pursuing-elite teams work through the 4 months anyway, and how we all don't want to work harder than we already do. How many people actually think the Jones' would get untouchably better in an open season, or would even force us to work much harder? The Jones' I've seen here seem in favor (whether they're for the concept or not) of spreading out in an open season just as much as others. We've already heard from 67 that they don't even work the schedules we're talking about, we see Daisy's at their limit, and we know 1114's mentors are mostly weekenders. I guess I just forgot, because the gap hadn't occurred to me before.
The few posts I think that have real merit to the top 1/3rd of teams getting much better with an open season are those that believe they would build entirely new robots for championship. We see this in VEX a lot yet rarely is it the team that copies someone that is winning the World Titles but I guess the meta-game of trying to beat the current fad copy machine could be a bad thing.

However I just don't think this will happen in FRC or at least not at the scale that it happens in VEX. It's just much harder and resource intensive to copy most mechanisms in FRC and get them right. If the game allows for something very simple to be copied that dramatically improve effectiveness then teams will do it and already are Minibots, ball magnets, etc. However I just don't think many teams would see something like 1114's climb in Week 2 and have a duplicate/improved machine ready to go for championship. There are teams that are good enough, have the machining capabilities and drive to do this sort of drastic overall and rebuilds and some of them do it now. However since you can't build an entire FRC robot in a weekend or at least not one that can compete for a world title like you can in the smaller robot competitions I don't think you will see nearly that many direct copy robots or even complete rebuilds.
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