Quote:
Originally Posted by gblake
If the team that meets less gets a net of 30-50 hours out of adding three weeks to the build season, doesn't their competition get 60-150 more hours?
To me that sounds like the teams that meet less (but that still show up with usable robots) fall further and further behind the other teams as the build season get longer. It that the outcome you want?
Blake
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Don't want to get too much into this conversation but in regards to hours vs performance. There is certainly a diminishing return after a certain point. A team only really needs to be "good enough" in order to be competitive at the top. Now of course the team that invests the most man-hours generally has the advantage but it doesn't make them unbeatable. For example in 2013, a team that goes from 2 cycles of frisbees to maybe 5 cycles can be a big jump for realistically not that much time(relatively). All it really takes is to have a scoring mechanism(in this case frisbee shooter) that works pretty well and doesn't jam or break. Going further than that to 6 or 7 cycles of frisbees can take a ton of optimization and practice time though. I believe John V-Neun said it best though that ~"the last 10 percent is half the work"(can't find quote). That being said, 5 cycles of frisbees vs 6 cycles isn't a huge margin of error for the underdog to pull out ahead. Even without defense, a good match for the 5 cycler can beat the 6 cycler on a bad match.
To summarize, giving both a lower and higher tier team extra time, the lower tier team is likely to improve more than a higher tier team using more of that extra time.