[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Ilovepineapples

I do not see this as a positive development. I won't go outright and say I dislike it but I feel this will narrow the designs we see even more than in Ri3D.

Now we'll see the same VEX designs repeated over and over by all teams using the same pre-fabricated parts. We'll have some nice looking robots and VEX will have a bigger pocketbook.

I don't think Vex is going to produce the only viable designs, nor, likely, the optimal ones. What it will do, however, is provide viable designs that have already been proven to work for teams that do not have the resources to experiment with many different ideas. This significantly raises the floor of the competition, and I think that is a good thing.

Anecdotally, in 4464's rookie year we did not have the money nor manpower to pursue prototypes if we did not know that they would eventually pan out. The Ri3D two-wheel linear shooter made our robot possible that year - not because we copied it exactly (we didn't - our robot was a full-court shooter and looked very little like theirs), but because they demonstrated a working proof-of-concept and we could purchase the parts for a similar design with the confidence that they would eventually make it onto our robot. That was invaluable.