[miketwalker]

I like Heidi's idea... I've been playing with something similar to what she said in my head for a long time. It's kind've hard to describe without a game scenario so I'm going to make up a completly hypothetical game scenario just to show my idea. This particular scenario uses a 2 vs 2 vs 2 robot match setup in a circular like field (which I know neither the circle field or 3 sets of 2 robots will probably happen, just easiest to use).

Now, at the beginning of the match you'd have whatever the points are and 3 zones (one for each alliance). The matches would be 3 minutes, at the end of every minute your zones change. In other words, you recieve points at each minute park. This would force teams to get points into a zone and then get them the heck out've there and onto their next zone for the next minute part. This allows for many scenarios too occur, and requires teams to have a good offensive and defensive bot... but would involve more complicated scoring, but would result in alliance partners working together (whereas this year some teams would just go for the bar and the other partner would remain to do the rest... which can work, but there's no cooperation). The only way this could work would be drastically redoing the field and robot setup, but would always keep a consistantly upbeat match being both exciting to viewers... as well as a PAIN when it comes to strategy. Tidbits of this could be incorporated into many of the other drastic changes in this thread already.

But DEFINITLY bring back the time-rush scenario we saw in 2001... although I wasn't around, it is much more exciting to have a time crunch in some way. With robots competing against one another it's highly doubtful they'll all shutoff before the end of the 2 minutes, but if you make something in the scoring happening in time increments, there will be a ton of rushing... but you want to make it dynamic so teams don't completly win a match. If you brought back the boxes from 2003 and mixed them with this zones, yea... that'd be fine and dandy to put all the boxes in this zone... but make teams get them back out (like in the 2003 game, make them have to get the boxes back over to the other side after a minute, but make it simpler to do with fewer obstacles to have more robot interaction). This would encourage teams to try many new strategies (In my mind now, I'm visualizing robots like Team 25's 2000 robot... where in that game they could be dynamic... but if you made it where a arm can't just move things around, it'll create a very strategic game). Just my thoughts. It could be incorporated in several ways. I'd love to see dynamic scoring though.