[Lil' Lavery]

All the aspects of gameplay dramatically improved from thursday-saturday, even greatly from early friday or early saturday. Albeit, my perspective is slightly tainted, because 116 was paired with and against several very good robots (such as 343, 435, 1731, 510, and 1541) in VCU, here's how I rated it from my coaching vantage point:
Ramp: 21-30% (most of the teams claimed they could, and most could get partially up, but often didn't either give themselves enough time or needed some assistance to get, only about 25% could do it consistantly).
Corner Goal: 31-40% (there were a bunch of herders who could score 10-15 corner goal points easily in match, typically in only 1 or 2 dumps. A few could even score 25-30 points per match. A few of the center goal bots also posessed this ability, but most did not fully utilize, nor needed to).
Middle Goal:<10% (although this dramatically improved as the competition went, very few teams could score many, especially not without having to spend 10-15 seconds get aligned and wasting half of their ammo on test shots, even without someone playing defense on them. A few, such as 1731 and 343, did get turrets working, although a majority of the shooters were relatively simple in design, did not have good corner goal potential, and lacked turrets).
Scoring in Autonomous:<10% (a ton of teams were having trouble getting their code working, aligning their bot, competing for starting positions, getting past randomly charging defensive auto bots etc)


An intersting observation I had. At VCU, it seemed many of the "traditionally competative" teams were not as competitive, and some of the newer teams definately accepted their spots. Two of the 3 winning alliance members had numbers 1500 or greater (1598 and 1610), 1522 was a finalist, 1731 was the #1 seed, 1541 the #4, etc. This especially interesting consider the fashion in which these teams stepped up, and took on the highly difficult proposition of shooting at the center goal, accurately. And they definately succeeded in that venture. The "old guard" is by no measure dead. 384 and 435 (both finalists) have been two of the most dominant teams at VCU and they definately kept their dominance alive this year.