Eliminations was much more exciting...
I admit the qualifying rounds weren't all that exciting to watch. Most of those robots just played nice, and each side could score very easily. There weren't too much fighting among teams, nor were there lots of movements going on. Once the teams figured out the score is set, their robot just stayed there until the match is over.
However, elimination was much different.
There was a lot of robots rushing toward the goals and fight for them. Usually they ended up in a pushing war, but it wasn't just 4 robots sitting there stalling each other.
It was quite exciting, actually, when robots were stealing goals from each other. It ended up more of 1 vs. 1's during a match, with a few occasions of switching fights around the field.
It was also very interesting when a pair of robot came out the first round and lost, and then won the second match when they switched out the 3rd partner. It made it so that the two strong robots couldn't win it all the first two round. I thought that was interested to watch. Makes us felt like the competition isn't winning one sided by a good pair of robot.
Mean while, the timing seems to be just right. Some of the matches took the whole 2 minutes to determine who's winning, some other matches were decided with about 15~20 seconds left, which the losing alliance trying everything they can during that time to change the score.
I thought elimination was great to watch on the web case... Except one thing... The light wasn't all that visible on the robots sometimes. It was hard to tell who's in whose alliance sometimes. But it wasn't too big of a problem during elimination after watching the same pair of robot working together over and over again.
Oh, by the way, qualifying rounds wasn't all that excited last year and even back at 2000. The teams usually played nice during qualifying rounds to get as much points as possible, instead of trying really hard to win. So, I think it will be like this most of the time... Dean and Woodie can't really design a game that will especially draw spectator's attention in...
|