Putting aside the discussion about whether or not cheesecaking being allowed is a good or bad thing, just for a moment... I think calling for a rule to regulate or ban the practice is a
huge overreaction that's just going to result in some overzealous volunteer somewhere disqualifying some alliance for upgrading each other's robots based on the subjective interpretation of an imperfect, knee jerk reactionary rule.
Instead, we just need to realize that there's a reason this behavior was so strongly emphasized this year. It's the
game design. We just need the GDC to never design a game with this perfect storm of unique attributes again:
- Extremely critical task that is difficult to accomplish
- Strong incentive to "race" to complete this task first
- Chokehold strategy present with successful task completion
- No defense
- To a lesser extent: Cluttered field with lots of areas for congestion
When you have this, you'll have essentially mandatory cheesecaking if you want to win the world championship. While there was some upgrading in 2014 to get robots to provide assists, and in 2013 to block frisbees, all of these upgrades were fairly simple, limited, and things that teams could probably have done with all of the parts they had themselves lying around their own pits. The biggest instance of "cheesecaking" to the same scale and importance I can think of in the past was actually 2011, with the minibot race. My team went to an event where the event winner survived a scorched earth alliance selection by picking the best tube scorer in round 1 (despite lacking a minibot), and a kitbot in round 2 that they could mount their minibot and deployer to. A few alliances at the Championship played with placing the spare minibot ramp of the fastest robot on the alliance onto a second alliance robot.
If you look at the list of attributes above, you can see why it happened in 2011 as well - a chokehold strategy was present with the minibot race (unbeatable score), there was a strong incentive to do the task best / first (denies points to other alliance), and the task was extremely difficult to do well. Can we eliminate these features from our games? Then we don't have to write some complex or subjective rule to eliminate a behavior that at least some people really don't like. We can sidestep this discussion entirely by just not playing with these terrible game mechanics.