- The game. If it's even accurate to call it that, since Recycle Rush was way more of a challenge than a game. Specifically:
- It wasn't a good spectator game. My sister only liked watching noodles being thrown after seeing parts of Alamo, SVR, and champs. (In general, watching stuff being thrown is more fun than watching stuff being pushed around.)
- The lack of defense, and alliance interaction.
- The chokehold strategy, and matches decided in the first <0.2sec.
- The all-or-nothing points, especially in autonomous.
- The multiple game pieces, both of which were necessary--using one and doing well was almost impossible.
- The unscored litter points. Everything about it--the fact that only HPs could score it and that it has basically no point and yet could disable the best robots--was frustrating.
- The inability for third robots to contribute much. I'm not against cheesecaking from any side of it, but it would be nice to have a game where it's not required to win.
- Difficulty for teams to score. Litter points were often the majority of points scored in earlier events. The importance of containers, the easiness to knock over stacks, and the all/nothing scores made many low scores.
- The focus on working alone. There were a few alliances where teams would work together to stack/cap, but the most successful ones just did cycles by themselves.
- Average points for elims advancement. I'm divided about how I feel about if for quals, but for elims it's just brutal. One match can completely ruin a team's chance of moving on, and there is no way to make it up.
- Mecanum. We've done it once, and I hope we never do it again. It's confirmed what I thought, and much more. I never would have expected us to get sucked into the "mecanum trap*," but we did, and it wasn't fun. I'm looking forward to the return of defense so we won't do this again. That said, it was nice to see it well implemented by many teams.
* My name for the idea that omni-directional movement is important enough that spending time on a drivetrain that we've never tried before, and will spend a significant amount of time on, will help us in the end. (Okay, it's just team-specific, but it was something I learned this year...)
- Champs webcast and the whole split screen thing. We tried to watch a few of our matches from the pits, and it was very, very difficult to tell what was going on.
- Paper airplanes. This really needs to stop. Period.
- The split champs announcement, how it was done, the response to it, and the town hall meeting (from what I've read/watched, I wasn't there in person). Basically the whole attitude about it, their unwillingness to listen, and the complete lack of any survey beforehand.
In all, 2015 was an interesting year, and one that I learned a lot in, but one I'm very happy is ending. Good bye 2015. Good bye Recycle Rush. Good bye and good riddance.