Quote:
Originally Posted by JohnFogarty
It is very much late in the season for this kind of decision to be made in my opinion.
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On the contrary, I expect the majority of teams in FRC to make this decision in Week 5 or Week 6 of build season.
I think most teams have decided to go for it, but many, many teams will learn during testing that they are not very good at it, that Mechanism X interferes, that they have to drive slowly / in a specific way to go through it. At this point, some teams will see an opportunity to be better at X / Y / Z aspect of the game in exchange for not being able to go under the low bar. For many it will be hanging. For others perhaps a more accurate shooter will work with extra height. Maybe the mechanism teams use to go through other obstacles just can't tackle the low bar for some reason.
Now is when teams need to be thinking about "is it worth it", because the end of the season is when teams tend to break from their strategic objectives. Teams who "should" be keeping low bar functionality WILL give it up for the sake of keeping a "cool" mechanism, and teams who "shouldn't" be keeping the functionality will at the expense of the rest of their robot. It'll happen for sure, so we should have an informed discussion as to what robots should keep this capability and why rather than shutting down people for being "too late".
(The painful thing about this decision is that, if teams that abandon the low bar decided to abandon it from Day 1, they would be much better at every other aspect of the game simply because of the loosened constraints. The jack of all trades is the master of none, after all, and this is a classic case where over-reaching can hurt a team's season)