[iVanDuzer]

There's an underlying tone to the posters where someone says that the two alliances decided to be "GP" and play "in the spirit of coopertition." I'm sure this is not the intention, but the overall effect of these statements makes it seem as though any strategies that are NOT run-and-gun-offence-no-defence are by extension un-GP and not in the spirit of coopertition. And that's not cool for me. I've been taught from day one that coopertition is competing like crazy on the field, while helping each other off of it. It's giving your all and then shaking hands and mending bots after. It doesn't exclude defence. Furthermore, implying that playing defence is "un-GP" is wrong as well. As long as you aren't actively trying to tear robots apart, nothing your robots do on the field has any reflection on GP. Clean D is professional - I see it all the time in the NHL.

Speaking of the NHL, I don't think the original players ever thought the game would evolve strategies like the NJ Devils' famous "trap" defence that won them a bunch of Stanley Cups or the Left Wing Lock that made the Soviets a powerhouse. We are given the game, but the game is defined by how we play it. Last year the game changed drastically depending on what robots were on the field: you had cyclers and climbers and dumpers and full-court-bombers. It was a different game every match. And that was cool. Every (cleanly executed) strategy was just as much in the spirit of coopertition as the next. No one was "superior" to others, and nobody implied that the "proper" way to play the game as FIRST intended it was for every robot to climb the pyramid, or to have three cyclers, or whatever. They were just simply different ways to play the game.

Maybe I'm being too worked up over nothing. Maybe I'm being pedantic. Maybe I'm just way too tired. Or maybe everyone needs to take a deep breath and really consider what we write about each other and ourselves. Worry about the implications. This thread is a great example of what happens when we don't.