[Billfred]

Alright, so I was talking with someone (Gary, perhaps?) at Robot Rodeo about how utterly evil it would be to switch the balls in this year's game to ping-pong balls, or ball pit balls, or just something that's freaking small. (On the flip side, you should've seen the balls as of Friday night. Horribly overinflated...some were watermelons. But I digress.)

But back to the subject at hand...FIRST hasn't tried a game where scoring was real-time (as in not when the field was at rest) since 1995. As far as I can tell, FIRST was a different thing back in the day. However, having been all intimate with a field now, I'm more than certain the method could make a proper revival.

So, what's the big idea?

Consider a field covered liberally in ping-pong balls. Or ball pit balls. Or anything annoyingly small like that. Teams get two minutes to herd up said ping-pong balls, and feed them through a sort of hopper system, which counts and scores them. (For a human player element, have the scored balls feed back into the player stations. They then have to return them to the field as fast as possible, so their robot could re-scoop and re-score them. Just don't let them drop it into the hopper/robot.)

One point per ball, with a bonus for a hopper-blocking item being on top at the end.

Pros: Action until the very end. Since there's a theoretically endless supply of balls, you want to keep going until the very end of the match.

Cons: Another complicated field (ask anyone who set up at the Rodeo), field reset will hate it, real-time scorekeepers will be obsolete.

Thoughts?