[Andrew]

I like this year's qualifying system. It is much more direct and to the point. Win and you're in. Lose and you need some help. Unlike previous years, you can actually control your own destiny.

Even though you need to rely on your alliance partner to win the game, the scoring system doesn't make you rely on your alliance partner to attain your rank.

In previous years, you could design a robot and devise a strategy that would allow you to win (invariant of alliance partner), but you could end up out of the top rankings because your opponents did not score enough points. In other words, you had to rely on both your alliance partner and your opponents!

On another topic, I am appalled at statements that equate defense with badness. It seems to me that a large portion of the FIRST community has a deliberate blind spot when it comes to defense.

Defense is a relevant objective of the game. Had the game designers wanted the game to be purely offensive, they would have separated the alliances with an impermeable barrier. We are expected to compete over the game artifacts (goals, balls, space on the bar).

Especially in this game, where there is so much territory to cover and so many teams have an effective offensive strategy, designing a competitive, consistent defensive strategy is a very difficult engineering challenge.