[Libby K]

Originally Posted by uggmun

It wasn't exactly a rant towards the Ri3D program as it was towards my team's rationale.

Not exactly, what they picked was "safe". I would understand copying an Ri3D robot if you're a first year rookie team, but our team has had two robotics competitions under its belt. If we are going to advance beyond our current position, we need to innovate beyond rescaling Ri3D designs to fit on our chassis. We've had plenty of innovative designs suggested within the team. The problem is that my team fears taking risks, so we take the "safe" route.

My team's been around for 9 years with 18 events behind us- and we're still taking bits of pieces of things we like from Build Blitz & Ri3D concepts.

I think it's made our season go a lot smoother so far - we are NOT copying, but we've seen what's possible and are improving on it from there, where we might not have been able to do that in previous seasons & would have spent six weeks just getting to a point of 'eh, it's okay'.

Your mileage may vary, but I think teams are gaining a lot of help from this more than they're being stifled. The point isn't to have something to copy and create, and finish your build season early- it's to have a new jumping-off point that isn't 'oh god, how does this game even work?!' so you can spend the rest of your build season improving.