[Andrew Duerner]

One of the critical aspects of 1717 in 2012 was that the abilities of the robot, to out maneuver defenders and score at a high enough rate to clear all the balls from their side of the court. This allowed them to change the meta of the game, which was to have 2 offensive robots and 1 defender robot. They essentially changed the game into robot on robot defense, where the opponent side of the field was very crowded with 4 robots, and the 1717 side only had 2 robots. This made it even easier for 1717 to maneuver around collecting balls and returning to safe shooting locations. Changing the game meta has a huge impact on matches and events giving the other alliances seconds to adapt or minutes figure out strategies to counter which is very difficult. Interesting that 2016 constrained the meta by limiting the number of defenders to 1 robot.