Robots damage determine the outcome of matches...
A couple of times I saw alliances lost in the finals because their robot died out in the field, in an important match that determines if they advance to the next level or not...
This is rather depressing. Teams didn't intentionally damage others to win, but the nature of the competiiton force robots to died in the middle of the field once a while. So now which robot works and doesn't work in matches determines who's the winner and who isn't.
This year, strategies only played so much in the finals, before it ended up raw pushing matches between robots. I saw a couple matches where robots try to win by strategy when they couldn't consistently get two goals, and failed. I wonder if this is really the intention of FIRST when they first designed this game...
And, are those robots not built to be really robust and reliable? I don't think so... There were some very great machines that died outside the on the field for whatever reasons, and for most of the times they worked really well in a matches... I wonder what's the most common reason why teams died out in the field...
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