Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Johnson
[*]Keefe2471: Posted quote from Joe G. TLDR: WE decided to Limbo but we are worried that THEY will struggle. ... Scaling in 2016 = Canburglaring in 2015. ... There are better ways to play the game than to limbo. Joe G. has a lot of great things to say but he lost me with Scaling is this year's Canburglaring. One literally ended the game on Einstein in the first second of autonomous and mattered almost not at all for 95% of the matches. Scaling is just one more way to get 10 points by a robot. It matters but it is not in the same class.
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Just to clarify: I did not mean to suggest that Scaling is of comparable overall strategic importance to Canburgling. Rather, I wanted to look at the the variety of tasks FRC games have presented, and the degree to which they actually impart hard tradeoffs into the design process and require detailed analysis to determine if the pros of going for a given task outweigh the cons. There were a whole lot of teams in 2015 that justified their decision not to initially incorporate Canburglers into their 2015 robots with logic based very firmly on a purist sense of "we're not going to try to do everything, we have a simple robot, Canburglers are hard," when even a low tier Canburgler (a stick on a Versaplanetary or 3/4" bore piston) achievable by nearly every team and addable to nearly every robot after the fact could literally have become the most attractive robot feature of a good chunk of FRC teams. I think we will see a similar pattern in scaling this year. There have been a lot of rumblings about how hard and not worth it scaling is, but like Canburgling, it can be achieved effectively by small "auxillary" mechanisms, the type that's easy to work into any robot with withholding after seeing a cool implementation in someone else's reveal video. It won't provide the massive gains that Cangurglers did, but it's a potentially worthwhile bonus with very little risk associated with it.
The idea was to contrast this kind of task with the low bar, which dominates the design process with brutal tradeoffs in a way that these tasks just don't, not to imply that Scaling will be the sole deciding factor on Einstein. Scaling was a particularly handy way to illustrate the relative worth of the low bar because so many teams are claiming "Low bar is more important than scaling" through their designs and priorities, and a good scaler should have a much more consistent expected value for thee act of scaling than a shooter.
Also we're definitely worried about struggling as well
. We think that we've approached the tradeoffs inherit to our strategy in a way that plays to our team's strengths and mitigates some of the chronic problems we expect many low bar machines to experience. Scarcity did play into our decision making process, and we expected low bar machines to be far less common than recent polls have suggested. We're locked in now and it's going reasonably well (I'm feeling quite a bit more confident in our design, and by extension, many other teams' designs, than I was when I made that post), but if we knew then what we know now, we may have still gone down a different path.