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My thoughts on the 2004 game:
1) The totes are gone. Did you see how many of those things we burned through at nationals? I saw a bunch of the crew working assembly line style to keep those things plentiful.
2) I would love to see an asymmetrical field. Lets REALLY screw with the programmers heads during auto!
3) While we're on assymetry, what if the field parts actually change position after each match? (i.e. the tunnel changes places with the ball basket or something?)
4) Ok, we've seen circles (balls) and sqaures (well, rectangles in the totes), and so, it seems that the next logical step is triangles! Yessirree, triangles. It would be a huge pain to design something to grasp a triangular prism, so putting them in a box somewhere or something would be big points.
5) I like that if your robot ends in a specific zone you get points for it, its incentive to leave other points undefended. What I dont like is four robots all trying to get onto a platform just barely big enough. I think that was what made this game so physical, more than anything else : fighting for the top of the ramp. So either a larger robot home zone or seperate zones.
6) Several challenges a robot can perform: Lets get more diversity among robots! Granted, several teams come up with unique robots, but overall there are distinct trends in construction. With more than one challenge, robots would be geared towards 2 or 3, and based on how teams prioritize the challenges you would get a much wider range of design.
7) At least one of the challenges should include some kind of fine manipulation: place the prism on the small shelf 6 feet in the air, or something
8) Scoring: Overall, I think that the scoring system this year worked well up until the elimination rounds, and the only problem there was that with only 2 rounds, one round is entirely too important. I would suggest going to 3 rounds.
All that said, let me tell you that these came right off the top of my head, and I'm sure there are flaws. bonus points if you can tell me where I'm wrong!
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"It's broken? NOOAAHH!!! This is your doing, isn't it!"
"We can fix it in the software!"
"It's a BROKEN GEAR!"
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