Quote:
Originally Posted by Doug G
That would be one way of trying to compete, but I doubt it would result in more teams being competitive... The more likely scenario is you rebuild a robot based on what you see after a week 1 or 2 event before you compete in week 5 or 6. Oh yea, that kind is already happening.
Many teams already do this... it's called prototyping. We built a low bar robot prototype and after seeing how it performed, we continued with that design. If it didn't perform, we would have gone with a taller bot. But to do this, we had to stockpile a ton of material and pay for express shipping for items so it would be done in the first week. Wasted money.
Are you sure about this? I can't speak to the district system or for events in other regions, but out here in the west, every event is full and teams are having to go out of state in many instances. Look at VEX events. Look up the early events (Sept & Oct). They seem to fill up. Why? VEX teams know to be competitive at the state or national level, to maximize the engineering process of iteration, to get lots of competition practice, you need to compete at several events. The top teams in VEX attend several events and iterate their robots in between. Isn't that a good thing?
So might early events not get the sign ups as quickly... maybe, but I don't think it would be as dramatic as you think.
We need to stop it with this "6-week build season" nonsense... those days are gone. Let's move on without B&T, save some $$, and level the "rough terrain"!
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I'm not saying that waiting to see how the game plays out or copying the top performing robot will result in teams being more competitive, just that there would certainly be a percentage of teams that take advantage of the possibilities that arise from being able to have a longer build season than other teams. Seeing how the game plays and what is effective is just one of the reasons to do so. More time to perfect your robot, driving and programming are other reasons.
There is a big difference between prototyping before you know how the game will actually play in the real world and waiting until you see how the game plays in the real world to start or finish your robot design. Fact is that we all have an idea of how game play will go and what the effective robot will look like and many times is does not how it actually plays out. In the context of this year's game many teams may have initially decided that the 5 extra points for scaling isn't worth it. However if you see that the winning alliance did so in part by having 2 or 3 robots scale each match that is likely to result in teams rethinking the importance of scaling and potentially do something like scrap their high goal shooter for a scaling device.
Yes in areas where a lot of teams end up on waitlists like CA (which is not the entirety of the west coast) all the events would certainly still fill up. Further up the west coast in the PNW District we currently see that the later events have traditionally been slower to fill and we often have to beg and sometimes bribe teams to attend them. That has changed somewhat this year since we adopted the MI system of assigning home events and the fact that 1 of the 2 week 5 events is closest to the majority of teams.
For my team our home event is week 2 and the 2 closest events were week 1 and week 5. I chose the week 1 event as the lesser of two evils, back to back district events or back to back with a district event and DCMP, if we qualify. By the end of week 4 there is a large number of teams that either fall into the guaranteed to go or guaranteed not to go to DCMP. If there was no bag day I can tell you for certain that I would have chose the week 5 event instead and there would have been a bigger battle for those few remaining spaces.
Yes continuing to iterate and hopefully improving your robot and/or strategy is a great thing and is what gives teams what I call the full engineering experience. Removing Bag Day does not further that goal. Making sure that teams can attend 2 events is what furthers that goal. You can then make those changes based on what was learned in the "real world" of participating in an event. Which of course is why I'm a huge supporter of the District System and Bag Day too.