[Billfred]

One thing that I would really like to see officially sanctioned in the manual are some rules for when events are ginormous (like GTR or some of the other larger regionals) or really tiny (read: under 24 teams). I know that GTR had twelve alliances (and thus a few eighth-final rounds), so it's not unheard of.

Another thing I'd like to see return is that of the clock-stopper, like in 2001, perhaps with the final score of an alliance divided by the number of robot-seconds used. Lots of the stuff getting crammed into the heads of USC business majors has to do with measurements per machine-hour, labor hours, units produced, et cetera. I can only assume that they're teaching us stuff similar to that found in the Real World. (You could extend this further by penalizing teams who waste their raw materials, like their tetras from 2005, but we'll save that for another time.)

Finally, one that might be interesting to see is a game that involves something like (American) football-style plays, with a bit of starting and stopping over the match. Suppose, for example, that when a robot on an offensive robot makes contact with the side barriers, play stops and both sides assemble again on a line of scrimmage near the site of contact and play resumes.