Quote:
Originally Posted by Leav
Akash, what I don't understand is this: who benefits from the current model of the build marathons?
I can see rookies benefiting, but I think rookies have been doing fine since before these marathons.
And I won't shy away from saying this: AndyMark and VEX definitely stand to benefit commercially by demonstrating how to build successful robots with parts available from their stores.
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I don't think anyone is oblivious to the fact that this is an awesome way to market their products. I, in fact, like that this is a way to show off to teams how to use COTS parts. There are a TON of teams who don't even know about all of the COTS items available to them. Maybe I like the free market and capitalism, but I don't see anything negative about this.
As for rookies "doing fine," why is it a bad thing to want to raise the level of competition in the process of marketing a product? Should we, instead, maintain the status quo? [Edit] Also, I saw a few weak veterans do well this year due to what they learned from Ri3D. It isn't just about the rookies. Ri3D affected teams at almost each level. Rookie teams and weak veterans got ideas of how to tackle the task or gained confidence and reassurance in their own ideas, while mid-level teams had a great baseline achievement to evaluate the performance of their own robots against. [/Edit]
In the end, I don't see it as a huge deal. I pretty much stated my opinion in
this post, but I will re-evaluate after this season is over.
I think of it in the sense that you can really only control what actions your own team takes. Rather than asking for the resource to go away, make a plan of how to react to the videos and incorporate all of this information into your own build process.
Past those points, feel free to discuss via PM, since I don't have much more to add to the discussion. I want to just wait and see how it all works out.