[Jaql]

Personally, I liked the direction FIRST was going with Aerial Assist. Fast-paced, cooperative, easy to understand games that had everyone excited. The head-to-head aspect was fantastic as usual and even my friends who weren't in FIRST got stoked on it.

I'd love to see some mix of Rebound Rumble and Aerial Assist in the end. A game based around a ball game piece being transferred from robot to robot from one end of the field to the other into a scoring platform. I love watching the more "physical" games that involve defense strategies. Games like Recycle Rush are rather dull with no alliance interaction.

It's important to balance the challenging aspects of a game with the viewer excitement when they watch it. Aside from 24 people driving, the other hundreds of people have to enjoy watching matches.

I would also include some elements of Aerial Ascent in my game. I really enjoyed the secondary objectives at the end. Perhaps my ideal game would be somewhat like field hockey, with a ball being dribbled from one end to the other. More passes = more points. Start with two balls of your color in your side of the field and you bring these to the other end in autonomous and score them. After, you can feed in up to three white balls per alliance which can be scored by any alliance. These balls can be contacted by any robot and should be brought down the field.

You score extra points for crossing the ball over the middle of the field horizontally (i.e. bring it from the left human player station to the right goal on the other side of the field) and extra points for passing to other members of your alliance. The other alliance can intercept your drives and take possesion of your ball to gain points for their alliance. If they manage to block a goal and return it for a score, they double any points they would have scored on that drive.

In the last 20 seconds, the goal is to be the only alliance with robots on top of an "island" platform surrounded by slanted ramps. You can push other robots back down in the last 10 seconds. You have to have 2 robots from your alliance in order to score, and the other alliance must have less than 2. If both alliances have 2 or 3 robots on the platform, no points are scored.

Obviously point values would have to be determined for each action after playtesting for a while, but I think this would be a much better game than Recycle Rush IMO.