[dellagd]

It seems like lots of people keep arguing that, if a game were to be reused heavily, that younger teams would not be at a disadvantage despite not experiencing the game that a new game is based on. I just can't see how this could possibly be the case.

The first reason stated is that with the proliferation of match video and team video archive online, any team should be able to go online and check out the mechanisms that worked in the past. Well, of course that is true, but there is a very distinct difference between quickly seeing a low quality video of a mechanism and actually remembering all the development process of it and what traps need to be avoided. You might even actually have your past CAD models of your own mechanisms, or the old robot! This is a huge advantage over any younger team who never did any of this.

Another argument is that, well, since you have to re-make you robot every year, those past mechanisms wont help anyway. I mean, lets look at drive trains for example. Teams develop over time designs that they like to use on their robot and may parallels can be drawn on the drive systems of teams year in and out. I'd reckon many of them do some CAD equivalent copy-and-pasting too.

Veteran teams are VETERANS. They have experience in FRC from their past years of competition. They will always have an advantage over very young teams, and making a game very similar to one in the past just heightens this advantage.

From previous years games its apparent that FIRST likes bringing up the rookies by providing easy scoring opportunities. 5 points for drive in auto for example. They want this to continue, so to reuse many game manipulation elements or game pieces are fundamentally not in their interest.

This game will be new in the physical realm, but I suspect the recycling will be of the rules and not the physical elements. He did recycle the manual after all, not a deflated excessive ball or Frisbee.