[mathking]

Jason, very nice rant. Joseph I think you hit the nail on the head. So many times I have seen teams not helping their allies get free to shoot. This requires some coordination. After watching a lot of game film, we have come to the conclusion that sometimes the most effective "blocking" is to get the blocking robot to lead the way and get between the defender and the ally with the ball.

This year I have felt what I see as two distinct kinds of frustration over the game. The first is that penalties are too big (and often because the refs are toggling between pad screens too inconsistently called) so that penalties incurred by accident are changing too many matches. I completely understand that frustration. The second is the "We built a really great robot that can score well and this 'box on wheels' just keeps running into us." While I understand that frustration, I think it might well have been intended by the GDC.

Probably more than any other FRC game I have experienced, in Aerial Assist good driving and good strategy trumps a good robot. I really liked the games the last two years, but they were both games in which one really good robot could dominate most alliances. I was describing this year's game to a friend and he said "From what you said it sounds like it is how well you act without the ball that determines whether your alliance wins."

In one of our better matches, we were partnered with 4269. They were acting as the middle robot, picking up from 4306, heading to the white zone and passing to us. When a defender was near us they would give us the ball and then drive the defenders away from the side of the field giving us a clear lane to score. We got three 40 point cycles (after having to spend some time clearing autonomous balls) fairly easily this way. That match made me focus more on thinking about what the robot should be doing when it doesn't have the ball.