[Beth Sweet]

Once again I'd like to emphasize Karthik's change of the word "bad".

I think that this year's game brought on both the "bad" robots and extensive defense. Both of this year's game objectives were very difficult. Trying to make a manipulator capable of lifting a ringer is quite the engineering feat with lots of little issues (getting the arm to move, making the gripper move as intended etc.) as does trying to make ramps. Since the ramps cannot be rampy on the field, you have to design something that deploys during the match. I've seen a lot of robots that either get 1 ramp to deploy, both ramps get stuck halfway... etc.

It's a good thing that FIRST is raising its expectations for us, that it's trying to make our robots better and more technical knowledge is required. But personally, I prefer something like last year, where an offensive move (such as low goal scoring) can still be effective, and even teams with few or less skilled engineers can create an offensive robot that can compete. Last year, that's all our robot did was low goal, and we could still be effective.