[Donut]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

In my opinion, teams that thought the autonomous mode wasn't worth it this year, especially those that see it as only 2 points, really didn't examine the strategy and potential game play well enough.

True true. Far too many have thought one tube won't matter, when in fact one tube has decided a number of matches. Of course, this seems to have happened every year in autonomous; everyone thinks it will be of little value, and only once competition starts does the full potential of it get demonstrated (last year most teams still didn't have an auto at the beginning of week 1 and 2 regionals; as the regionals played out though, most robots at least tried to block at the end, because everyone recognized the advantage autonomous gave teams).

Also, even if you're looking at just raw tube value (not the potential value if you put up all the other tubes on the field), autonomous still has the potential to score your alliance up to 24 points; there are 3 keepers per alliance, and 9 ringers on the opposite end of the field, all of which can be legally scored in the autonomous period. I would greatly like to see some of the teams scoring keepers consistently go pick up tube to prepare for tele-operated mode, or even try to score that tube (most teams are done scoring keepers in less than 10 seconds anyways). I know we'll be trying it, and for teams that are beyond us and already had keeper scoring working, this would probably be easy work for their programmers.