[Spider-Man]

I believe that a large part of this is a safety issue and another part is a fairness issue.

Safety-wise:
Unless a team purposefully has a robot that is the minimal parts to be inspected covered in bubble wrap with a flag holder and access to change battery and so on to be placed on or in another robot, we are talking about robots designed for participation in this year's game. This strategy can be tempting to certain alliances to guarantee points at the end of the match; however matches are a dynamic experience with many things changing. A robot could leave autonomous on and do something before an e-stop is pressed, or an attempt to throw a ringer onto the rack could disturb something in the stack. More likely an issue is defense of such a strategy, which expands the number of robots at risk.

Fairness-wise:
I remember our team discussing the possibility of placing one robot on another at the beginning of the game, but the more I think about it, it does not seem very fair. An interesting strategy would be to deploy a ramp and have a partner drive up it in autonomous, which would be kinda neat and similar to what we are talking about, yet the difference here I think is vast: the scoring is done based on the merits of the robot in its entirety of hardware and software. Stacking a robot is also unfair to the competing alliance, which depending on the makeup of the other alliance, may encourage them to do the same. I don't think we want to see a three robot stack versus a three robot stack in a match for a 60-60 tie, nor do we want to see one-on-one matches with 30 guaranteed like this.

Furthermore, as the season has progressed, we have seen teams defending the bonus point lifts before the endgame, which I believe should continue to be legal if done within the spirit of the rules. How would one defend a pre-match stack? I would want to just push them outside of the home zone, but how safe is that? Is it fair to have an indefensible 30-60 points sitting on the opposite side of the field?

Rule-Changing:
As far as FIRST changing these rules after build and even during the competition season, I sincerely hope no one was betting on interfacing with another robot to this extent. Competition has shown that it was hard enough to interface robots for getting bonus points let alone for piggybacking. The GDC probably weighed the fairness and safety of the issue with a pretty good example to show that this would probably not fall within the guidelines of Safety, the Spirit of the Rules and GP when it comes to the opposing alliance.