[muffinofsteel]

The part of this debacle that irks me the most is how it could make FRC robots use the same basic design of a robot. This though may be a result of games becoming "samey", ie. shoot the ball into the goal. There's only so many ways you can put a sphere into a goal. The fact that we have COTS manipulators may be due to this lack of variety in the games. For the past 10 years, FIRST has had 5-6(lunacy) games involving spheres and goals, allowing teams to use designs from older games, which in my opinion is boring. The one thing Recycle Rush got right was being a unique game. It had a game piece that was only used once before in Stack Attack, and even though the game was boring, the designs were not. There weren't any viable COTS manipulators to stack the totes. I saw variety at competitions, due to a lack of reusable designs and COTS parts, which i don't expect to see as much this year. This game seems to lean towards having a low drive train and ball collector, which with COTS parts isn't a difficult feat. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if a box on wheel was an alliance captain.