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Unread 08-02-2016, 23:12
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Re: Terrifying Karthik

I think the low bar is the MOST unique and intriguing game element in my 8 years of competing and I'm excited to see how it plays off in different places and different times of the competition season. This is a very unique game in that core movement of a robot is directly contributing points at a nigh-even pace as other challenges in the game and that alone should have provided not necessarily a shift in a team's strategic design, but the perspective they take to the game.

I would say that one of the championship-winning viable strategies involves doing as much as you can with the low bar constraint. I think there is a very slim sliver of teams that can/should/will successfully package their robot with the low bar constraint and compete at a powerhouse level, which I think is obvious.

90% is definitely not a terrifying number (as someone who embellishes for effect wrt honing strategic design in FRC with students, it feels like what he said was slight hyperbole) it certainly gives me pause. Remember, this is a game where your core movement is directly contributing points to your final score! This is giving teams an opportunity for teams that can't really surpass a Tier 0 function of core movement, right?

You'd hope so. This game features many "pinch points", both literal and in terms of the meta of Stronghold. The meta pinch points will show up in congestion of RPs in qualifications. One robot can in theory, get 1 RP by itself with a well executed strategy. It is literally impossible to get 2+ RPs by yourself without getting a win. I want to believe the RP system this year will actually be awesome, but I worry that the pinch point with capturing is going to tick off some teams in qualifications and give you a level of randomization of lesser but still nontrivial levels of 2012.

You get another point of congestion where you have elimination alliances of 3 low bar robots. Quite simply, unless the other 21 robots in the bracket are low bar robots, you're potentially at quite the disadvantage. Imagine a scenario with a 3.5 foot tall, impeccable high goal shooting robot you are playing against. There are some ways to solve that problem, but they involve tradeoffs you tried to skirt around at kickoff...

The elephant in the room is the literal pinch point. Team Icarus flew too close to the sun and locks themselves in the low bar during a match. That's probably the most terrifying thing.

I probably didn't actually guess right, but that's most of what I have gathered. If it's really that terrifying and no one has said exactly why yet, I imagine Karthik has a captive audience here.
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