[jweston]

My biggest concern is how low bar teams did their cost-benefit analysis. The poll suggests many teams felt there will be a huge speed pay off to going under the low bar. This speed pay off has to be high enough to outweigh the compromises made to effectiveness at goal shooting, breaching, climbing, and blocking.

The special thing these low bar bots bring to the table is the ability to ferry balls into the courtyard quickly, as well as breach the low bar. But points are scored on scoring goals, breaching, and climbing, not ferrying balls.

It gets interesting when you have so many teams making the same types of trade-offs. The more teams doing the low bar, the less of a premium there is to it. In the meantime, they must live with the design compromises made in order to make it under the low bar. This makes it more likely that there will be a premium on bots that can do well with goal shooting, other types of breaching, climbing and blocking.

Getting under the low bar is nice for an alliance to have, but it's not a killer feature. An alliance can score in all ways without a low bar bot. I'm not as sure that an all-low-bar alliance is as likely to be equally effective. There's just too many other aspects of the game that a low bar bot team might have underestimated in value or in difficulty. Time will tell.