[PandaMan]

Originally Posted by Josh Murphy

I believe that this game is becoming very defensive. Anybody can build a 120 lb chassis with 8 motors on it and just beat everyone and win, and alot of teams have done this because they think it is to hard to score on the rack. There was one point in Detroit when we were pinned against the rack by our opponents on friday and we were not moving and they just continued to push and broke our cross pieces. The refs did not call anything and. I believe that 3 defensive robots with no tube scoring abilities and 1 ramp will win this game more than any alliance that can score the tubes. This is just my opinion.

I agree with this. From what I saw from several week 3 regionals was that teams began deviating from the rack and started playing more and more defense. In theory, an offensive bot can out-push any defensive bot in their way. In reality, due to the threshold on pushing power, defensive bots can effectively stop offensive bots from putting up any points at all. On top of this, the offensive bots are receiving no help from the refs while the defensive bots pound away at their base/manipulator. I understand this game requires a lot of contact, but machines can only take a certain level of abuse. I think this can be fixed if the refs pay more attention to this[defense penalties] aspect of the game. (I'm not bashing the refs in any way; I'm friends with several of them and I know it's a hard job watching several different things at the same time- this is just a suggestion for the future.)