[Kevin Sevcik]

I'm at a loss. I'm, frankly, slightly upset that you seem to think that these "bonus" points are somehow second class points that aren't really important to the game. The fact that they are winning many games seems to blatantly contradict this. You also seem to be of the opinion that ramps and lifters are somehow an easier engineering challenge than making an arms to move around tubes. I assure you that scoring bonus points well takes just as much thought and engineering as designing an effective arm. Witness the ratio of good ramps and lifters to poor ramps and lifters. I have seen far far more static ramps that are near unscalable and lifters that don't, or worse, flip robots over. I can tell you that getting our lifters to work as well as they do took a lot of designing, calculating, and redesigning.

As to the point of your opinion that the "bonus" points are never the main "point" of the game.... I must respectfully disagree. I will assume, to remove pure semantics from the argument, that "bonus" points are those scored based on the position of robots or scoring objects at the end of of a match. That said, in 2002 robots and goals were scored based on where they were at the end of the match, and controlling goals was the most dominate strategy possible. In 2004, robots scored 50 points for lifting themselves off the floor by grabbing a bar 10' off the ground, clearly one one of the largest challenges in that game. In 2005, teams could score massive "bonus" points for owning rows of goals with tetras. This was one of the most important scoring mechanisms, and swung many games. Honestly, "bonus" is just a word the GDC is using to separate ringer points from ramping points. They could just have easily called them "non-ringer points" or "ramp points" or maybe "Atlas points". The modifier would have just as little meaning, and the points would be just as important.

Again, my primary point here, and the one I'll leave this thread on before I own more than 50% of the posts is this:

The point of FIRST is, obviously, to inspire students in engineering, etc. The "point" of the game, in so much as it has one, is to present a problem to be solved using engineering skills. In my engineering training one of the most important things I learned was to simplify your goal to the most basic level. Your client may come to you about designing a robot for this game speaking of a robot to pick up tubes, etc. However for this game and all others your actual goal is simple. The point of the game is to win the match. If the point of the game was to score ringers, we'd have ringer races to see which robot can score ringers faster undefended.