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Originally Posted by xXhunter47Xx
I honestly don't really see a problem with this game after watching a couple regionals. It has it's flaws but everything seems well-organized and methodically planned out.
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When I first saw this game my jaw hit the floor and mentally I was like "they didn't just switch out of PvP did they? Oh god they did? What have they done?" But considering how drastic of a change this is from last year a lot of things that I would find problematic with the game I would just gloss over due to the fact that I don't believe the GDC does the level of game testing that lot of video games do to make sure everything runs smoothly. Or just the shear amount of time explored a lot of sports have to find little kinks.
Either way I did find a few slight problems with the game.
The litter felt underutilized and I really feel like more should have been done with it. There was way too much litter on the field doing nothing. Limiting to one noodle per bin made it seem like there was more litter then this landfill could actually handle (why are all these totes in a landfill and why aren't the nested in each other whoever setup this landfill could really do a better job optimizing space usage.)
The scoring was a lot more closed and it really showed. With auto situations where you had to meet conditions more strictly, then say one robot make it in the auto zone and you get x points. Instead it was team wide. This would have been really nice because it means the point difference is more defined and wouldn't punish teams who had robots that were either disabled or didn't have auto. That binary condition of "all in" punishes any team who wants to utilize the auto for anything that isn't short term scoring.
The actual process of scoring really limited the diversity of mechanisms. Mix it up a bit have some of the bit that wrapped around the entire scoring platform be a ramp, some of it have no ramp. Have some totes already be stacked but harder to get to. Personally I would have wanted to see a bunch of different color totes starting out either scrambled about the field and bonus points awarded for same color stacks or the inverse of organized colored totes and bonus points for rainbow stacks.
Asymmetrical fields are cool but this field layout was kind of stale. Going for a shot in the dark in that the platforms are laid out that way so no matter where you start on the field you couldn't attempt to pull bins off the step, and do a 3 tote auto. Other then that the actual scoring platforms didn't really enhance the game that.
The step didn't seem like a big factor even though the there was a rule that said "You may not react with the horizontal surface of the step." My first thought was that it meant we could utilize the step for scoring. My second thought was that "no they just don't want you climbing over the thing." (Got me with the phrasing GDC well played.) What would have been more fun IMO is if you got rid of the step except for where it elevated the recycling bins and where the coopertition stacks were placed and let robots travel anywhere up to the opposing sides staging zone while enforcing team specific safety zones on scoring platforms to prevent people from just knocking over other peoples stacks so you could take there totes but not destroy there stacks.
I absolutely want to see the GDC re-vist a lot of the mechanics in this game but tune them in a different direction.