[Mr. Lim]

This year's game was REALLY hard. Arguably the hardest FRC game I've ever been involved with, dating back to 1998.

It would be too easy to tell this mentor "Hey! None of the 3 World Championship winning teams could climb past 10 pts. They were dedicated Main Event-ers! They were pretty darned successful!"

The irony is, because the game was so hard, it actually worked to the advantage of the non-elite teams. If they had the cajones to pick just one thing to do well, and spent the entire build season dedicated to doing that one thing at a World Class level, they had a shot at winning big this year. I saw a lot of teams in Ontario make huge strides with their on-field performance, because they took this philosophy.

Even the best of the elite teams struggled to "do everything" and do it really well this year. There's a long list of historically great FRC teams who didn't have as much success this year because they built robots that tried to do too much, and ended up doing everything poorly. In fact, the two robots who put up the single biggest individual scores in matches this year (469 and 1310) notably couldn't climb past 10 pts. I don't recall any robot that even came close in individual robot scoring (~140 points in a single match) that could 30 point climb.

I actually think the game needs to be "too hard" to give teams like 3289 the best chance at winning. To take advantage of this, it means teams have to bite the bullet, and focus on building robots that do one or two things really really well, then lean on great strategy and scouting to piece a winning alliance together.

It probably also means the end of an era of dominant robots that can "do everything," but I too think this is probably a good thing...