[ASmith1675]

Unfortunately, I have far more negatives than positives this year, which seems to be the general consensus based on the posts here compared to the positive feedback thread.

1. This game was dull. It felt dull immediately after the game was announced, and my opinion did not change much. There were moments of excitement, but they were few and far between. Most of the time there wasn't even much cheering when a qualification match completed because there was no winner. In fact, the only time when there was much of a crowd reaction at all was when something negative happened, which shouldn't be the most interesting part of the game.

2. The area in which alliances had to work was over-crowded and any unplanned or uncontrolled robot motion could end put costing your alliance a lot of points. An alliance should ALWAYS be at a disadvantage if they're playing 2v3, but that was not the case this year, and in many cases it could have been considered a strategic advantage.

3. The Can Races. Possibly the worst part of this game. The cans are the most valuable resource in the game, they are limited in number, and more than half of the cans available to each team can be contested by the opposing alliance. I don't consider myself a strategic mastermind, but I saw can races coming as early as day 2 of design, I have trouble believing the GDC didn't see this coming. Once a certainly level of play was achieved, this was a required element of the game. Most of the matches on Einstein were over within less than 1 second of autonomous play (barring mistakes -- again, rooting for failure?). While it didn't decide every match, it decided the majority.

I feel that these races are even worse than the minibots were in 2011 in that everything comes down to the activation from the FMS. I never saw a clear answer about how robots were enabled, but when the race comes down to 100ths of a second, having something completely out of teams control possibly decide the match is a pretty terrible decision. NOTE: My team did not create a canburgler mechanism (though it was discussed), so this particular comment is not a reaction to a specific event.

4. Litter. Thrown litter was at best annoying, and at worst completely detrimental to watching robots actually perform the game tasks. I saw 0 robots that manipulated litter at all and none that intentionally "cleared" litter to the landfill. (Being the lead scouting mentor I watched nearly every match of both of our regionals). What I did see is litter actively clogging up drivetrains and mechanisms of many robots. Watching a high quality robot fight with a pool noodle as it drives is not inspiring to anyone. Thrown litter was also worth far too many points. That 1 piece of litter was worth the same as a 3 robot motion auto was a joke. (Though this may be more related to auto scoring than anything)

5. Co-op. The co-op bonus this year was not well designed. It felt very weird that the co-op task didn't seem particularly related to the rest of the game. I saw plenty of robots that could score co-op, but never built a normal scoring stack. Additionally a good number of very successful robots couldn't do co-op at all. Just a strange design decision. At least they could have had a way for the yellow totes to be useful in the playoffs.

6. The relative worth of these robots moving forward. These are the worst demo bots since 2009. I doubt we'll ever use this robot after the post season competitions are finished. We already had a demo which we could have used this years robot for, but opted to used 2014 instead. It was a massive hit, to the point where we broke our dog shifter by shooting so much. And because we were unable to get replacement parts quickly, we're using 2013 as a fill in. 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 all made good demo bots to some degree. 2015 will sit on a shelf, because its too big to easily transport, and the tasks it completes are not generally "cool" to demonstrate.