Our reasons for floor pick up were almost identical to 33. We spent several hours simulating the game the day of kick-off. After doing this we being able to pick up off the floor gave teams the following advantages:
- Floor pickup allowed a team to run a 7 disc auto.
- The 7 disc auto allowed you to stack the auto points in your favor
- The 7 disc auto gave you a huge advantage in a match. An alliance that scored 13 in auto had 24 point advantage on an alliance that scored 9 in auto. This was the equivalent of 2 additional cycles an alliance would have to score to overcome that deficit.
- Similar to other projectile games (2006 and 2012) very few teams would be greater than 75% accurate. This mean there would be discs on the floor for us to pick up most of the time.
- Prior to the rule change, human players could throw discs down field. Having a floor pick up allowed a team to pick up discs that their human player threw down field for them, saving them the trip to the other side of the field and back.
Here's our experience with having a floor pick up:
-Designing and building an effective floor pickup was very difficult and required a lot of tweaking to get it just right. We were constantly changing little things about the floor pick up through Champs. Arguably the hardest system we've had to design in our 9 years.
-We had a 7 disc auto. This was important for different reasons as the season progressed. At our first event (San Diego, week 2) where many teams didn't even have a 3 disc auto, the 7 disc picked up the slack for them and then some. By Newton when almost everyone had a 3 disc auto, the 7 disc gave us a big advantage over most alliances out of auto.
-Because of the 7 disc we were never lower than 3rd in auto points. At San Diego we were tied for 3rd and at both Inland Empire and on Newton we had the highest auto score of the event.
-Since we were at or close to the highest auto score, we were always at the top of our WLT bracket.
-In San Diego we did a lot of cycling, however as the season went on and we improved the floor pick up more we found it was faster for us to pick up missed shots from our partners and opponents than to go to the feeder station.