[Jared Russell]

This game had some of the most straightforward and easy to understand (and therefore enforce) rules of any FRC game in recent times. This ruling undoes all of that...

1) "Control" is not given a definition in the glossary, so who knows how this will be called in practice...

2) I hope you are planning on floor loading totes, because this effectively outlaws most HP-to-robot transfers that don't involve the tote touching the floor (depending on the definition of "control").

3) If your human player (or partner) accidentally gets a noodle lodged in your robot while poking it through the litter chute, you are disabled. Additionally, if a noodle is "controlled" by a can that is "controlled" by the robot, am I violating G27?

4) The design of the litter chute and tote chute, along with the human player rules (ex. G6 and G6-1) already provide TWO layers of defense against robot-to-human contact. Do we really need a third?

Regardless of how the GDC feels about this issue, further clarification (at the very least, a definition for "controlling" a game piece) is necessary. I hope they will revisit this ruling and provide an exception to controlling objects in the chutes as long as the robot itself does not enter them. This would totally remove subjectivity from the equation and is clearly preferable to having to come up with an arbitrary ontology of allowed interactions with totes and noodles (ex. active rollers vs. passive rollers vs. clamping game objects vs. a sloped piece of lexan...)