[barn34]

In my oppinion, making the following tweaks for week 2 will make a world's worth of difference.

1 - Like many have already mentioned, g40 calls have absolutely killed a lot of matches. 50 points is an absolute match killer. I completely understand the desire to keep human players safe, but I would recommend making a change so there isn't a penalty if the human player extends beyond the BACK of the human player zone to allow them natural full range of motion in loading balls. Many human players have arms that are long enough that it doesn't give them enough room to comfortably operate. This is one of the primary reasons for crossing into the safety zone and incurring the penalties, I feel. Allow them to guage where they need to place their feet in order to load balls as desired without crossing into the safety zone. Also, I would change it to a 20 point foul with a warning before hand. If you warn them to watch the safety zone and they still end up crossing it later in the match, then feel free to penalize. Just make sure they understand that they're doing something in the wrong so they don't keep doing it unaware they're crossing that invisible boundary and incurring fouls.

2 - Add in a score keeper for each alliance that also control the lighting of the pedestal. As soon as a ball scores, the points go up in real time and the pedestal lights. It's really a small problem that has an unfortunate ballooning impact on the game. Time is everything and the referees need to focus on the robot to robot interaction. Allow the score keepers to follow each ball and responsible for lighting that white barrel when a ball is cleared. Again, this echoes what many have said already.

3 - In terms of robot to robot interaction, make robot contact to anything inside bumper perimeters an immediate 20 point foul. Inconsequential or not. And it must be called. Every time. If the robot is a repeated offender or if any contact is a direct cause of immediate significant damage to another robot, that's a 50 point technical foul. That also needs to be called every time. This will make every team's drivers think twice about how they're going after playing defense and make them play it the proper way, the safe way, with focus on bumper to bumper contact only. This will make drivers retract intakes or orient their robots so collisions occur on sides where damage done by extremeties will be avoided. This will be a huge benefit to every robot's long term health this year and will also keep all participants safer. Hopefully, this will also discourage play that breaks down into glorified battle bots, resulting in very unwatchable contests. This game is a great one to watch when alliances are working that ball strategically across the field. I love the cooperation needed to play this game well and while defense is a big part of the strategic game, it can't be allowed to break matches down into a glorified robotic slug fest. Robots can't get away with blindly ramming away at each other and double (or even triple) teams on the same robot. This trickles into another rule, but blockading needs to probably be reworded (or at least enforced) so that the double and triple teams on one sole robot are eliminated or highly discouraged. We blew our main breaker in the match we were eliminated at CIR trying to work through the double and triple teams of the other alliance pushing against us in attempts to keep us from getting that ball up. Strategically, it was smart, but very very frustrating to play and didn't make for a fun match to watch either. I don't think that is what the GDC intended, at all, I'm sure.

I do feel this game has a lot of potential if something is done to eliminate some of the above concerns. Hopefully, a rules change/update/focus allows for the real potential of this game to shine through moving forward the rest of the season.