Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber
You've just answered your own. You look for highest possible levels of play. That's worthless. You need to look for highest achievable levels of play.
Aside about Death Cycles - I think you VASTLY overestimate these. Actually, not pulling punches, I think you're full of crap when you say it was optimal AA play. Why? Because it requires 3 robots to be perfectly suited for each other. Which then has to happen in an actual alliance... which given how the draft works is all but impossible. Not only that, but given the ease of adding some PVC up to 5' to a defender bot (bonus points, backboard for inbounding) it makes the inbound to a stationary scoring bot VERY difficult.
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I agree with the first part. I suppose I've assumed teams would almost always rise to the maximum possible ability, as my first two games were 2011 and 2012, where for the most part, teams did. The games were nearly maxed out at times.
Now I could be totally wrong about death cycles in 2014, but I disagree that the right alliance couldn't have formed. 900 and 1918 were in the same division (which are basically the two robots necessary IMO to make it work), and I don't see a few inches of PVC stopping 1918's inbound.
(However, other problems, like 1918's occasional shooter problems and a missed inbound or two into 1918 could have spelled doom for that alliance, but it would have been incredible to see happen)
I feel like Aerial Assist had more room to grow strategically (which is amazing, considering how much that game evolved throughout the year). I wanted to see perfect death cycles executed, then countered by an alliance that abuses the lack of defense by executing repeatable catching and forcing the death cycle alliance to fall apart back to a normal style of play.
But I think that's part of the problem for me: I'm trying to look too deeply into a game that we don't have
that much time to play. The game isn't going to evolve the way other sports do over years, it's going to evolve over 8 weeks of competition (and evolve immensely), and will be limited by size restrictions, power restrictions, etc, not just by player skill and ingenuity.