[Corey Balint]

Originally Posted by Greg Marra

I disagree with you about Rank 'N Roll encouraging a maneuverable drive train. If you don't have the stickiness and the power to stay put when someone is trying to push you this year, you will have no chance of being able to score a tube. precision manipulation with an arm requires a stable base, and if a team is trying to nudge you, they probably will be able to.

I want to see games with more variety and strategic possibilities. I think adding the three different weight classes of robots this year was a really interesting idea. What if they took the idea even further and limited classes even more? We might see even more innovation and teams working to fill specialized niches, as in the 2004 game. The past three years there has been a single viable objective for teams. This year starts to change that a bit with the idea of a "carrier robot", but there really isn't enough differentiation.

Force teams to do something other than push hard and do one thing well.

Greg, I gotta disagree with you on the weight class idea. They are going in the right direction, but I think they need a different type of variance. I really dont see alot of designs changing drastically do to this rule.
Raising the Bar, in my opinion, is the best game FIRST has had. It had alot of variance. You could be a ball manipulator or you could hang, or you could do both. In recent years, you basically had to make an arm or make a shooter. There really weren't multiple options. FIRST needs to concentrate more on making those options available. They don't need to have different shaped game pieces (that might make it too difficult), but they need many more options. This year, you dont have much to choose from.