[Mark McLeod]

I found 3-on-3 to be very exciting this year and would like to see it stay. The complex give and take of capping and recapping kept the advantage swinging from alliance to alliance. The field was jam packed with action and I found the scoring to be almost secondary to the overall exciting play. After all the hard work of the build period it’s nice to have the additional playing time 3-on-3 gives us.

The qualifying alliance matchups were pretty good this year. We didn’t continually play with and against the same teams as happened last year. Kudos to the alliance generation algorithm.
As always the qualifying alliance parings can be good for a team and bad. Good alliance picking is very much dependent on good scouting rather than rankings, and based on the good teams I’ve seen sitting out the elimination rounds I’d say there are still a lot of teams that don’t practice true scouting. It can be very disheartening for a good team to be ranked much lower than a team who hasn’t shown up to a match all day (I saw this happen several times).

I much prefer having all three alliances play all the time rather than having one sit out a match, but I also realize the increase in risk and the impact on the whole alliance of a single robot failure.