[Kevin Sevcik]

I have exactly three negatives, I think anything else could really be lived with and worked out fairly simply.

- Rules consistency. As everyone has mentioned, it was rather vexing to have rules change from week to week and regional to regional. And sometimes from day to day at a competition. I think it's great that FIRST addressed many of the issues that were brought up, but the sheer number of updates after regionals started is odd. Not to put too fine a point on it, but after this move towards simpler, less complicated, more common sense rules we had a total of 21 updates, 7 after the first regional. In 2004 there were 15 total updates, 1 after the first regional. In 2003, there were 20 updates, 0 after the first regional.

- Penalties. I have no problems with the various 10 pointers for safety and aggression, but the 30 pointers still irk me. My team actually won our last match by one point.... thanks to a 30 and a 10 on the other side. I'm still chagrined by that win. I think the obvious solution is not to design such obvious choke-points into the game that they must be protected by match losing penalties for robots bumping into each other.

- Alright, I forgot my third point while researching the first one. There's a big mish-mash of whining about the trip to-from the pits, no match time announcing, no anything announcing that made our team rep late to alliance pairings, and various other small things, but the above two are the only big problems I had all season.

EDIT: Oh yeah, safety. Needs to be more of it. I couldn't believe it when I saw field resetters standing almost right next to the auto load zones. Didn't they know the some robots go in there at high speed? I saw one or two lean back a bit when an arm whipped in front of them. I'd have been diving for cover, but maybe I'm just a chicken. Not to disparage the ThunderChickens. Those guys are a whole different breed of poultry.