[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

I think hockey-style penalties would be kind of fun. If you pin someone for too long, the ref pushes a button and your robot is disabled for 15 seconds. That will make it easy for the pinned robot to escape and add a tangible penalty to the alliance.

If you commit a technical foul - 30 seconds of being disabled.

The only issue is this system wouldn't have worked so well this year since it could create dead balls. Then again, the refs could wait until the offending robot gives up the ball before assessing the penalty.

Another issue is that it probably wouldn't be too much of a disincentive for barely functional teams, so maybe it wouldn't work at the low level competitions, but at the high level events I think it would be interesting to try.

Another issue here is that these calls can't be reversed without replaying the match. Point penalties can be adjusted after the match, but not live disabling. We would need a rule set far less ambiguous and subjective for me to be comfortable with this idea.