[Chris is me]

This was the worst game I have ever played, and perhaps the worst game in FRC history. I don't think it's impossible to make a decent game with no defense. I don't think a decent stacking game is impossible. But this wasn't it.

Of the many fundamentally broken aspects of this game's design, the one that bothered me the very most is the strong disincentive for specialization. Doing "one thing well" was all but a competitive death sentence, and I think it will take years to recover from it. One of the greatest subtleties of almost every FRC game is that if you were smart and stayed within your resources / limitations, you could create a winning robot by mastering just a few critical aspects of the game instead of being a jack of all trades. Teams that over-reach who felt everything was necessary to be competitive often struggled, and those who learned the important lessons of setting priorities and knowing one's own limitations found incredible success. This year turned that on its head. If you couldn't manipulate both totes and cans, if you couldn't get a can with a five stack underneath it, you just weren't going to win events (without something odd like a can burgular, specific metagame needs, etc). Now a generation of students and teams have been taught that the only way to make it is to try and do everything. We'll see an increase in teams over-reaching for years, and FRC is worse off for it.

Obviously, the presence of a chokehold strategy in the form of the center can race was quite problematic. I'm sure others will touch on this point extensively.

The tournament structure, specifically average scores with no forgiveness for any mistakes, was atrocious. It's robotics - things go wrong. Consistency should be important, but if the first second of the first match can make your entire elimination run completely worthless, something needs to change. I never want to see the morale of a team so quickly killed again. I never want to have to make students play a match that they know is utterly pointless again. This must not be the new norm.

I'll have to post other things I have (including positives) later, I'm already procrastinating too much. But I just want to say - I have never, ever, ever seen an FRC game cause more of FIRST's most dedicated and respected mentors to reconsider their future involvement than this one. We can't survive more than one year like this.