[BigBen]

If you do not want people to foul, you must make it a big enough penalty for them to not want to foul. Take basketball for instance, I think that the "intentional" fouls at the end of games for time strategy reasons is kinda ridiculous.

In this game, if the robot pin and ball herding fouls were not so large it would have happened more and in fact been a large part of teams strategies. As it was, there was a lot of teams "accidentally" bumping the ball and some flagrant pins that helped them win games when refs were distracted this year because it was something you could do with relatively low risk. If it is either get caught with a questionable foul and loose the match or do it and win and possibly not get the foul, there are a lot of people who will take that chance. Even though it isn't in the spirit of friendly competition, if strategically it works, people will do it to win. I can even hear the arguments from those people already in my head "with a sports style game the robot should be designed to overcome pinning and blocking, either maneuver or push through blocking and shooting over or around other robots; basically that the other teams just need to design and learn to drive better".

I think the yellow/red card style is the only way you could do it fairly, but since those are currently for egregious actions, I think those should still stay that way. If we stay with a sports style of play, I think a similar system could be used for regular fouls in a way to penalize one team without penalizing the alliance. Have penalties called out with penalty points assigned to the offending team, if they add up over a certain amount during the competition, then they give a negative QP for that team. One or two incidental fouls would not affect any given team either. Could even be used as a tie breaker stat. During quals, the penalty points total and any negative QP would affect the overall standings, making people definitely not want commit fouls and would only affect one team. This could even factor through to district/regional/world rankings to have meta game implications. No one would intentionally commit fouls and would even try to avoid fouls because there would be a huge negative incentive.