[PayneTrain]

I voted for Zone Zeal. You know, the game that spawned the greatest robot before the 3v3 era. Why? No game has ever been so fundamentally flawed since the 1v1v1 era (I know little of 1v1v1 era) that it allowed for such an ironclad chokehold strategy. When 71 was fully functional, there was a zero percent chance any other combination of two teams in FRC could beat them.

2001 and 2003 failed because the rules were broken in the way that they tried to force the way we play robots into a way that doesn't work.

2009 and 2015 failed because they were games designed to shift the design paradigm, which is something that teams of all ages have difficulty handling, unless they possess the agility of powerhouse team that comes with a mentor roster stacked with a mindboggling combined years of FRC experience. A game that plays like an ugly mess isn't the problem with a bad game as much as it's a symptom of the game design backing teams into a corner.

Those 4 games all are cases where you can see where the GDC flew close to the sun in trying something interesting (you can say that claim is dubious for 2003, I guess, but it had some pretty interesting elements involved)


2002 was just a failure borne of either ignorance or indifference to the chokehold. If 2016 ends up being a game I could describe as being one borne of ignorance or indifference, can you imagine the backlash with how much money and time is put into this sport now compared to 14 years ago?