Originally Posted by Taylor
The most consistent complaint I've heard since 2009 was about the bumpers. The GDC abolished them, and I haven't seen a game with cleaner, more professional looking robots across the board. - Bumpers are still pretty important to the safety of a robot. Aboloshing them is a pretty strong word; I'm sure they'll resurface whenever we have another robot-on-robot challenge.
Especially on webcasts, it was difficult at times to read numbers on bumpers. There is no doubt with this game's setup. - Eric mentioned some good reasons that this isn't true above this post. It's still incredibly hard to see the teams' numbers on webcasts if you're viewing in anything less than 1080p60, and even then I've had some issues seeing numbers.
Teams have been liberated from the fear of robot mangling as a result of defensive play. There has been an explosion of creative, unique, elegant designs to play this game, and I believe many of these designs wouldn't have been considered if robots were being defended. - I don't see how this is a valid excuse for taking out an entire element of skill that drivers have to learn. There's not exactly an explosion of elegant designs from what I've seen; aside from a few outliers, almost every design follows the forklift or pneumatic lift system. Robot designs can be summarized to either a pneumatic/gearbox elevator or a tether bot (that also implements a pneumatic/gearbox elevator.
We've all got a set in our shops, whether we use them or not. Most of them collect dust; this year at least they were an option.
We put green things on gray things. What's tough about that?
For those that argue it's oversimplified, what about "We play soccer" or "We play basketball" when introducing past games? - "We put green things on gray things" is quite the oversimplification and doesn't give the spectators any idea of how scoring works. It's at the point now where I have to pull out the periodic table of stacks to try to explain the game.
While YMMV, I have yet to see a team field a robot that did not make a consistent offensive contribution to its alliance. In eleven years, I have NEVER seen that before. Once again, with the lifting of defensive play, teams were encouraged to actually PLAY THE GAME rather design to stop others from doing so. - Teams learn. Our team started off with a "box on wheels" but quickly adapted to the atmosphere and learned what defense was and even how to defend. That's like saying hockey or football would be better without any defense because then the best of the best could excel and even the worst of the worst drafted could do okay. Aren't linebackers just so annoying?
Sure, this goes for all years, but that doesn't make it any less true for this year. The intricacy of the game has really developed, and we're only halfway through the regular season! - All because a challenge has strategies that appear to emerge due to the unveiling of unique ideas at competitions doesn't mean that the game is developing.
We had a direct encounter with HQ earlier in the year, and they responded with efficiency, grace and professionalism. - I'm also grateful that the FIRST HQ is responding to inquiries.
It's a new concept to this crowd, and unsurprisingly there is quite a bit of opposition to this game right now. I wonder how it will be a couple of years down the road, after we've seen it played at the highest level, and after some concepts that were tested here reappear in different iterations in future games. - I've pretty much argued my point by now but I just want to iterate again that the highest level of play here is still lacking a much-needed element that doesn't exist. Watching teams simply pickup totes and stack them like mundane, automated warehouse bots doesn't require much skill and doesn't require as much of a high level of operation -- the only thing you need is a solidly-built robot.
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