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Unread 03-01-2015, 22:10
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AKA: John Gillespie
FRC #1153 (Roborebels)
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Re: The Noodle Agreement

Personally, I think the agreement is detrimental to the game in three ways:

1) It allows for the potential to gang up on the strongest alliance in the semifinal if the other three cooperate with each other but not the strongest one, giving them a 40 point advantage. This is a much stronger threat than in the quarters, where the numbers 7 and 8 alliances are unlikely to give up 20 points (and 40 points probably isn't even enough to knock out the number 1 alliance anyway).

2) It trivializes an interesting part of the game. Scoring the noodles in the recycling containers is perhaps the hardest engineering challenge this game provides (with respect to mechanisms, I think some of the autonomous tasks may be harder regarding control systems), and is worth at most 60 points (you can get more, but it requires the other alliance to throw their noodles across the field, which won't happen with TNA). TNA provides 40 of those points without any challenge, making building a noodle-handling mechanism much less competitive than it would be otherwise.

3) It complicates an already confusing game when trying to explain it to non-FIRST spectators. Do we want to explain (to potential sponsors or other supporters) why teams are deliberately scoring for each other? How about why, though the theme of the game is recycling, teams are choosing instead to leave the LITTER on the ground?

At low levels, points from TNA are likely to exceed points from actual robot actions. I'm not sure how the GDC envisioned this game, but I would be surprised if this was their intention.