[tindleroot]

The Tethering and Cheesecaking were my least favorite parts of this year's game. Coincidentally, both aspects were covered at some point by FIRST after kickoff day, and I believe they may not have thought through it enough.

The tethered ramps allowed any landfill robot to become equally efficient (if not more so) at the HP station just by adding .5 pounds of ramp and tether. Those HP robot specialists got the short stick with a task that was not much easier than landfill (since the totes came out at an odd angle and didn't fall flat).

The cheesecaking essentially removed the downside for high seeds in the serpentine draft if the alliance captain (or first pick) had a good cheesecake. The whole point of serpentine is to allow the low seeds to pick up the best 3rd robots, but even the 24th picked robot could become equally useful as the 17th picked robot (8th seed 2nd pick) at the cost of 1 pound of withholding allowance and a chance for mistake. IMO, cheesecake was a poor decision on FIRST's part and it could have been fixed by saying that your team's withholding allowance could only be used on your team's robot.

Other than that, I agree with most everyone else's comments. I hope FIRST listens to the community and decides to revert somewhat back to a contact game with win-loss.