[pabeekm]

One small issue I had with this year's game (and don't get me wrong, I loved Aerial Assist) was how difficult it made scouting. Last year, scoring totals, accuracy, basic drivetrain statistics, and climbing results were about all you needed to know about a robot. This year, however, you needed to follow individual teams very closely on a match by match basis (what they did with the ball, how fast their mechanisms were, how smart the driver is, how much they fouled, how good their partners were, etc.) because very often the match outcome and how much was scored were out of the control of any one teammate. Also, you didn't need to just know how "good" a robot was, but had to be really aware of what roles they could fill. This complexity is good in that it encourages teams to watch the field and heightens the strategizing, but it really hurts teams who don't have the resources or infrastructure set up for watching every robot in every match of such a complex game.

At champs this issue was especially evident because with 100 teams on a field, some of those teams in the top tier had never even played together or against each other and were unaware of what the others could do! One thing they might be able to try next year (if the game is as complex as it was this year) is use the extra space to host more, smaller divisions (maybe 60 - 70 teams each). This would make keeping track of the teams much easier, and cause teams to play with each other more often on the field.