Here's a novel idea. Instead of a game centered around balls, bins, donuts or floppies, we should just have and old fashioned drag race. FIRST should switch over to gas motors, Big Chevys of course, and let us duke it out. The guy to the finish line first, wins!! No silly multipliers, zones or x times the losers score to qualify! You cross the stripe first, you win. Easy for the spectators, easy for the players. Scoring is always so complicated in FIRST because there are so many ways to win and lose. As far as Descoring, it doesn't make much sense to remove points during the qualifying matches. During that time you want as many points as you can get. Unfortunately this year, the bins have no safe zone. In 2000, once you put the balls in the trough, they were relativly safe. It was easier to keep track of what your score was and what you had to do to beat the other alliance. Once you start plaYing elimination, who wants a big score? You only need to win by a few points. Go in, keep everybody from scoring, play Battlebots then move on to the next round. Seems years past required a little more finesse and strategy to win than all out brute force. Hopefully next year, FIRST will be open to a game that as Jim Zondag from 33 says has 1 upmonship. You can score x way relativly easily, but you get more points if you can top that with something which requires more work. That would also promote more challenging robot designs, and still give the rookies a chance to compete. Drag racing would be a blast though....Spring is in the air, time to bring the Camaro out, put robots away and listen to the scream of 700 horses tearing up the ashphalt!! And win or lose based on my own merit....
