[Peter Matteson]

To all the partof this rule that really upset me I don't think has been truely addressed, Dave's comments above made me feel the need to point this out. Most of you seem to be talking more about the human player loading zone which isn't where I see the problem.

In Team update #8 on 2/4/04 FIRST added the following line to <G14> which in my opinion drastically changed the rules of the game:

If a robot touches a loading station tetra before it is in the LOADING ZONE, the offending alliance will be assessed a 10-point penalty and the tetra will not be scored.

Prior to this update there was no mention in the rules of a robot having to be in the auto loading station's loading zone to acquire a tetra. Don't flame claiming otherwise I was keeping track of this for some very specific reasons. This was a strategy and robot design changing rule in my

One strategy I propsed because of this was a stationary robot that could grab tetra's and score them with out moving just by using outriggers. Had we gone that route our strategy and robot design would suddenly become illegal with little build time left to change this. To me that is the biggest issue with this rule. FIRST should not make new rules that have an impact as large as this during the build season.

Pete