[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Basel A

People keep bringing this up. After seeing it a few times, I feel like it needs an answer. What stops teams from doing this? The rules. The March 17th Team Update inserted the following into R17: "With permission from another Team, Teams may also have access to FABRICATED ITEMS that are part of that other Team’s WITHHOLDING ALLOWANCE to repair and/or upgrade their ROBOT." The end of the rule reads "Items made at an Event do not count towards this weight limit."

This means that if a team would like to cheesecake, they have two options: sacrifice their own withholding allowance (which has a weight limit) or sacrifice their own time at the event. It keeps teams from sharing huge mechanisms, while still allowing teams to help each other out within reasonable extents. This is a great rule. Kudos GDC.

You're ignoring the fact that this ruling was made after the end of build. Cheesecake was effectively limited to exactly those items. The question is what the ruling is going to be next year when a team bags cheesecake with their robot and then wants to put it on another robot. All the arguments in favor of cheesecake are still going to apply to shrinkwrapped cheesecake, so why would the gdc rule against it if we weren't discussing the implications now?