[Zuelu562]

I talked about this earlier, but it seems FIRST tends to skew the game one way or another (probably unintentionally) with the points.

2010's endgame was way too difficult for what it scored (IIRC, it was 2 points if you hung on your own, 3 if you hung off another robot, versus 1 point for each soccer ball scored). 2011 was the opposite end of that spectrum, where pretty much everyone agreed the minibots were WAYYYYYYYY too many points.

I think 2012 hit a happy medium; you cared about the primary scoring element and you could, in theory, bury an alliance under the weight of the basketballs, but the endgame also mattered a large portion of the time. It also helped that with the automated scorer that year, teams knew exactly what had to happen in the end game to achieve a given result.

This past year, was again, close, but an argument can be made that the pyramid scoring is off - whether you are in the 10 is too much or 30 isn't enough camp, something about the pyramid was off. Otherwise, I think the game was fairly balanced.

This coming year? Who knows, (oh wait, the GDC), but what I can tell you is that they've gotten better in recent years about getting scoring right and not completely devaluing a certain part of the game. I hope they have a game where they can use the high speed laser receivers again and avoid the debacle with 2013's *cough* "Automated" Scoring System.

</walloftext>