Wow!!! I like all the ideas presented here. They're really cool.
I especially like the 2v2v2 idea. But there is one suggestion I would like to throw out to you guys.
I think that the game next year should be divided into 2 parts.
1)
Individual Based
2)
Alliance Based
The first part of the game should include a section where teams play by themselves and try to score depending on the means of the game so that people don't limit themselves to building a robot based purely on defense.
The way I see it, there should also be qualification points based on the robot's abilities, ie. scoring through the normal method and gaining bonus points (so blocking doesn't gain any qualification points
). This should be determined while the robots are playing during the test matches and qualifying rounds. And robots that don't have enough qualification points aren't allowed to continue into the final round, even if they do well during the qualification rounds.
Then the second part of the competition should include alliance matches were teams work together to achieve the goal, something like this year's competition. Then during the alliance selection, teams form an alliance of 2 or 3 (based on whether you like 2v2v2 or 3v3 matches) and teams w/o enough qualification points should be removed from the list of teams that can compete.
To give an example of this (based on this year's game), lets say Team
BLUE has a bot which can score on the middle and low rack easily and has a ramp. That team would get 3 pts for low scoring, 5 pts for mid scoring and the ramp boosts there score another 5pts, totaling up to
13 pts. Then lets say Team
RED builds a robot which can reach all three heights for the tubes and score well. Then this team would get 3 pts for low scoring, 5 pts for mid scoring and 8 pts for high scoring, bringing their total to
16 pts. Now since both teams have more than 8 pts, which would be the cut-off for qualification points, both teams could possible make it into the final rounds. And robots which can't achieve this minimal requirement are automatically disqualified. (Qualification points don't affect your actual score in the game)
Don't ya think this is much cooler!?
At least we'd see MUCH MORE robots achieving the tasks given during the competition and less robots designed based purely on defense.
Don't get me wrong. I think defense is still a vital component of the game.
And it is what makes FIRST competitions fun. But teams should really be focusing more on the task at hand.
Plus (and this has little to do with the competition format), I think that there should be an award for teams who manage to gain the highest number of qualification points. That way, more people would try harder to build a cool robot and just some defender.