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Re: Week 2 Impressions of Rack 'N Roll
I believe the game started maturing to show its full potential this week. Attending GLR, i saw great changes happening from Thursday to Saturday.
In the beginning, the game was merely a race to the rack and whoever could put the most ringers on it would win. Ramp and spoilers were ignored, and the closest teams got to "strategizing" together was some alliance's coordination to put all their ringers at the same level.
Saturday saw a great deal of changes: two matches in particular illustrate that point. Quarter finals 1, match 1 (alliance 1 with the two best scorers of the competition, a.k.a. 67 and 1114) saw the 8th alliance almost beat those everybody already saw as the winners of the competition. How did they do it? they placed their ringers in an intelligent fashion so that they prevented any 6, 7 or 8 rows and hoped their ramp would be enough to win. Why didn't they win? One of their robot fell of the ramp at the last minute and their spoiler attempts was unsuccessful. Either of those attempts succeeding would have guaranteed a win.
Perhaps more interesting is Finals - match 3. Team 503 and their alliance were clearly less efficient at scoring ringers (no offense), and i believe they realized that. To counter balance this, they put together a great strategy. All three of their bot scattered ringers, preventing anything but rows of 4. Although they were successfully spoiled, it did not really matter as they were not relying on ringers but on a final lift. This lift did occur, and a penalty due to 1503 entering the home zone for a fraction of a second brought the score to 4 - 72 for the alliance everybody thought would lose.
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