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Originally Posted by ldeffenb
Okay, consider this: This is the first year that real live human people are coming up next to the playfield *without* the Plexiglas wall. The 30 point penalty, when you think about it, is to *absolutely discourage* *ANY* pushing/shoving/ramming near where these people will be. When a 'bot is in or entering the loading zone, there's a person there or about to be there. If anyone hits that 'bot, even accidentally, that person is endangered.
The rules for our drive team are to give the opposition's loading zones a wide berth. We'll do whatever we please near the goals, but *NOT* at near the loading zones. I wouldn't want the opposition harming my students (or my wife as she works for the field crew), so I'm not going to endanger their students either.
I, for one, firmly believe the 30 point penalty is sufficient and has a *very* good reason for being so stiff. Anything less would be ignorable by high scoring alliances and would lower the overall safety of the game.
Just my $0.02 (2 cents).
Lynn (D) - Team Voltage 386 Drive Team Coach
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The penalties aren't to discourage people from being unsafe. I can say this with confidence because there's a whole section of the game rules called "Safety" There aren't point penalties here, just disabling of robots.
The penalties in FIRST are mostly to shape the way the game is played. They discourage certain kinds of actions and similarly, scoring encourages other kinds of action. The trick is that this should work somewhat like a standardized test like the SAT. If you guess on the SAT, everything averages out to nothing. In FIRST, if you follow a penalty heavy strategy, it should result in you seeing no positive benefit, and possibly a slight negative consequence. With the way penalties are weighted this year, you instead are faced with huge negative consequences for an action. I think -6 for all the penalties would be sufficient. I don't see how interfering with a robot picking up a tetra is any more disruptive to their score than descoring a tetra or interfering with them scoring the tetra.
Look at what you yourself have said. You're telling your drivers to avoid two sides of the field for fear that you'll bump someone and recieve a crippling penalty. I think any penalty that scares people this much should be looked at.