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Unread 24-03-2007, 16:48
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Re: Week 3 Impressions of Rack n' Roll

I have a unique perpective on the 'impressions' because I had to work concessions with the university swim team at the Waterloo regional in both 2006 and 2007. I'm the only person on the swim team actively involved in FIRST. Every single person I worked with who had done concessions last year agreed that Aim High was by far the better uninformed spectator's game. They said it was more exciting, easier to follow, and faster-paced.

They all agreed that Rack n Roll was pretty boring to watch, because so few ringers actually ended up anywhere near the rack on a regular basis (yes, there are a few matches with high scores, but they are far from common). I think part of the boredom stemmed from R&R's tendency to devolve into pushing matches around the effective scoring robots near the rack.

In Aim High, a robot without a shooter still had to do an offense period, pushing balls around into the low goals or trying to impair an opponent's reloading. This required skillful driving back and forth across the field. There was action as robots flew from one end of the field to the other on the period changes. Because of the way the period/backbot system was set up, for 2/3s of the match there was at least one robot free to shoot or set up to shoot. Even a robot who missed was fun to watch as they showered the crowd with balls.

My own thoughts: I think the game is skewed a bit too much towards the defenders. It is too easy to disrupt an offensive robot. Some might say "but, in Aim High you had to accurately aim a shooter!". I respond that even the smallest jitter to the robot base multiplies itself at the end of a robot's arm, making it difficult to score. Simply driving near the rack can shake the legs, making it even more difficult to score. In Aim High playing as a purely defensive robot, 1281 encountered many robots with drivetrains built solidly enough or camera guidance programmed well enough to be nearly immune to everything but a full-speed ram (which is obviously illegal for good reason). In R&R, you just have to drive into the rack and knock the opponent around to get their arm swinging wildly. This results in a slower-paced game, and a tendency for a regional to get slower and slower as teams damage arms or realize that they can prevent far more points from being scored by defending than they can score themselves.

Other:
-Autonomous is really only as good as your alliance is. If you can't put up any more points or are defended from doing so, then those 2 points are useless (and can get negated by a skilled human player).
-I like that human players can score. Since it is such a difficult shot to make, it is pretty thrilling when someone makes contact and changes a match. It'll be interesting to see if some teams start training their human player so that this starts happening more often
-I don't like the "only 1 ringer at a time" rule. I think it'd be more of an engineering challenge and higher-scoring if you allowed teams to handle as many ringers simultaneously at once as they wanted. I imagine this rule was adopted because they didn't want robots internalizing ringer handling pez-style and popping them all, since they are less durable than balls
-I like the logo for this game better than Aim High's logo
-Autonomous might be worth doubling your points, BUT that's a bit disingenuous: the front three spider legs are much easier to score on in teleoperated mode than the side and back ones that you must stretch to in order to make your autonomous _really_ worth it. If you can score 4 in 90 seconds and run out of time getting a back ringer, then autonomous has really done nothing for you, since the 10 seconds it saved you is time that you had anyway.
Note: I wrote this without reading the thread (or any of the other impressions threads) so I could give my unfiltered opinion.

Biases:
-I was more involved last year, so it was probably inherently more exciting simply because I knew the challenges we faced better.
-I have 2 regionals and the championship to draw on Aim High impressions, while only 1 small regional of R&R impressions
-Humans forget bad things faster than they forget good things, so the rose colored glasses effect is probably biasing me as well.

Improvements I can think of, if the game were to be designed again:
-Find a more durable game piece and remove the "only one ringer at a time" rule. I think some interesting multi-ringer robots might come out of that
-Greatly dampen the swinginess of the rack: it makes it too easy to disrupt scoring, snags robots, and generally slows the game down
-Reduce the required heights and the points given for ramping by a small amount. This would make it more common, but also reduce the incentive for teams to sacrifice maneuvarability and scoring ability with enormous ramps. So we'd hopefully see more scoring AND more ramping.
-Put lights over every spider leg. This would encourage use of the camera to guide your robot on the other side, if you knew that there was ALWAYS going to be a light to guide you.
-Allow teams to score over top of other ringers. I think this would make for a more score-intensive game

Last edited by Bongle : 24-03-2007 at 17:28.
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