[evanperryg]

I think the need for defense varies based on the game. The kind of defense we saw in 2014 would have ruined this game. Just look at 2003: the only truly successful stacker I know of, 67, was designed to make one stack and protect it from all the robots trying to plow bins and knock over stacks. The same would have applied to this game if there had been a significant amount of interaction. This is purely speculation, but even if scoring platforms had been "safe zones" and knocking over the other alliance's stacks would award them penalty points equal to the value of the wrecked stack, that mess of gamepieces would have crippled the scoring abilities of many teams. An inherent part of defense is that it is spontaneous and very on-the-fly. Sure, the ultimate goal of defense is to stop the other teams, but this year's game would have been too heavily impacted by even the slightest misstep in defense (knocking over another team's stack). This year's game was centered around very precise, intricate mechanisms that would never be viable if defense were present, and defense would have made scoring any points extremely difficult.

Different levels of defense suit different types of games. Just because defense was a valuable part of 2014 and many previous games, doesn't mean that it would contribute anything positive to this game.