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Originally Posted by AdamHeard
It's not really a fair entry into this argument either.
It was a robot designed in ~ 2 hours and made in a day out of 2x4s that was top heavy as heck.
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It is however a decent indication that if 973 can build a semi competitive clone in a day, a much more average team should be able to do it in a few weeks?
1477 chimed in saying that they tried to do it and weren't overly successful, so maybe less teams than I thought would be able to pull the copy off.
2826 did a copy of 2013 254, which was (lets be honest here) a ridiculously complex robot. I dunno what timeline that was, but probably a bunch of time.
Of course all these examples show that the copies aren't as good as the originals, but that was the premise from the start anyways, so not sure why we are still commentating on it. The point is that it could very well up their competitiveness.
So then what don't I like about it then? Seems like a win win?
In my experience in other programs (albeit easier to modify and lower budget) teams have this need to be all secretive of their designs and compete late. Someone brought up VEX competitions filling early september and october. Basically those aren't any of the good teams. And usually whenever a design gets revealed/leaked before world championships it means it was done against the team's will/it was an old design and they already have a much better robot. A good example of this is the New Zealand vex teams which are incredibly strong and consistently put out championship winning worthy robots. They don't stream besides like their national championship very late in the season. Robots and teams there feel very distant to me at least. It is worth saying that there are some regions with webcasts and such do stream, Ontario being one of the main ones. I think the culture is slightly shifting into more of a sharing one too, but i'm not too involved in the VEX community anymore to be a great judge of that.
Plenty of teams already don't reveal anything until they absolutely have to keep their competitive edge. eg 1114, 2056, 2826?, 1678? I'm sure there are others, and for 2826 and 1678, I don't actually know those are mostly guesses in general they tease/reveal later in the season. Not that I don't understand the reasoning behind it and see how it's advantageous, it's just that I really enjoy seeing the robots in a polished way like 118 and so many other teams that put out videos earlier. Removing bag day I think would cause more teams to do this.
Copying is smart. Why re-invent the wheel? I just don't love the secretive nature culture that results from it, and I would prefer FRC not to be like this.