Quote:
Originally Posted by Kyle Stewart
As for teams that couldn't possess the ball, I'd like to share an anecdote. In LA, Team 687 had a drivetrain-bot that Team 294 provided a lawn chair for so that they could at least inbound the ball. 687, affectionately dubbed ChairBot, became a crowd favorite and was selected for eliminations. For Vegas, 687 had managed to add a functional inbounding mechanism. We selected them as our second pick because they were really well driven, could do quick inbounds, and were effective defenders. They performed well, sadly being damaged over the course of 6 brutal matches in the semi-finals (3 separate field faults -- one was due to the cameraman punching a ball heading to our human player). We lost the finals in large part due to their broken drive train, but we feel like they played extremely well prior to that event. I still think we made the right choice with 687, and it was just the field faults that put more wear on their drivetrain than it could handle.
Teams also got good at herding or pinning the ball to get assists. If they didn't know about that, it's the job of their stronger alliance partners to inform them of that and help them get those assist points. It's more work, but helps make drivetrain-bots feel included in the competition.
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The example given is a wonderful demonstration of a box robot being able to contribute to the game with a few modifications and some quick explanations. I concede that this is perhaps where AA shines in the way that no other game has, allowing box robots to really show off their potential. However, the game is also flawed simply in the way that it restricts the potential of teams that aren't in-bounders, but are not technically capable enough to be a high-level truss shot or finisher. This is the scenario in which you are telling your teammate to avoid picking up the ball and just play defense because you, as an alliance, fear a dead-ball or wasted time. We can see it as restricting the potential of a middle-tier team as their robot is realistically being told to not use the functions they spent weeks designing and building. This scenario is unfortunately repeated time and time again in qualification matches due to teams being unwilling to lose a match due to their alliance partners fumbling the ball. Perhaps an occurrence only seen at the regionals my team attended, it seems that the appearance of only one game piece per alliance has raised viewer-friendliness but at the same time also added restrictions on the other robots playing the game.
In the end, I still believe that Ultimate Ascent was better than Aerial Assist simply because of the fact that UA was much more versatile than AA. This can be seen in the different number of strategies that teams could go through involving different core fundamentals in robot design. (climbers, full court shooters, and cyclers, along with a host of designs in between). AA basically has one superior strategy of the triple assist in which robots all fell into and created designs with varying degrees of success for that one strategy. And although I admit that in the pure essence of AA, it was a good game due to its spectator-friendliness and attempts to promote teamwork, it falls flat in many aspects because of this lack of versatility.