Quote:
Originally Posted by cbale2000
To me Autonomous seems way overpowered this year compared to most. In past years when you would try to score an auto-specific gamepiece, if your autonomous failed, the gamepiece would be discarded on the field and basically considered debris. Other years without auto-specific game pieces you could score the same game pieces like any other in teleop but without the auto bonus.
This year was the first year that failure in autonomous could decide the entire match, not by being outscored by the bonus, but by the inability to score for half the match or more because you have to chase down and score the auto balls (and at lower point values, since no assists or trusses counted).
FIRST needed to implement a rule that allowed auto balls to be removed from play by simply getting them off the field, and not forcing teams to waste huge portions of their matches trying to score them.
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I'm not completely wedded to this, but I liked the consequences of failed auto routines. This is real life--when your program doesn't work quite right, most often it's not just that you don't get all of the bonus points--sometimes it can put a life at risk. It also showed the importance of developing a response strategy to quickly clean up the mess. Teams had to make choices about whether to chase more points or reduce their risks--again a real world choice in many situations. Because the auto score was capped at such a low level compared to 2012 and 2013, it was less important to the overall game score, and teams that made a different risk assessment could quickly make up the difference, unlike last year. In 2013, an alliance could nail its auto, play great defense and seal the victory with a big climb at the end. This year an alliance had to play the whole way.