Quote:
Originally Posted by chapman1
I tend to favor any sport that deviates from the American football paradigm of hurt or be hurt, and I suspect that some of this year's detractors really don't like it for that reason: they like the physical contact.
After all, this year was more a game of wits, wasn't it? If an alliance didn't win the match, it wasn't so much that they were blocked, but more because they didn't score enough points.
At the elite level, "defense" might have taken the form of an alliance not having enough cans - but those teams who saw that coming were the ones who excelled... not the ones with better defense.
I too didn't like this game at the beginning, but as it unfolded, I came to understand its brilliance. If nothing else, it shook things up: most likely, to prepare us for the water game :-)
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It's not so much the physical contact: it is entirely possible to design a game with defense that _doesn't_ have physical contact of any kind. Large protected zones so that contact is optional or indirect ways to interact/interfere with the other alliance (like my littercannon idea above) open up a whole world of strategy.
Mathematically, you could say the problem many people had with this game is that the scores of the two alliances were entirely uncorrelated (until extremely elite-level play where canburglars mattered).
My least favourite games are those with the most-rewarding physical defense: 2003 (ramming), 2007 (ramming around the christmas tree) and 2009 (ramming on ice) were all not fun to watch as you had a
kessler syndrome of broken robots turning into "defense specialists".