My first reaction to this year's game is not appropriate for CD. My second reaction was that it will be one of the most boring things I have ever seen; to pass time, I often watch matches on SOAP/TBA in the off-season and I felt that I wouldn't be able to do that this summer (too dull...). After a while I pretty much have stabilized my opinions to this:
- The early regionals will be boring
- There will be a lot of boxbots
- There will be a lot of broken arms
- Many teams will gear their robots too fast and damage them
- There will be a wide variety of poorly thought out omnidirectional systems
- There will be a bunch of slow, boring arms on slow, boring robots
- Trackballs will destroy ( or heavily damage) at least one robot per event
- The Championship will be very exciting, especially Einstein
So, I still have reservations (no defense strikes me as rather lame... I liked the cat-and-mouse game of good defense), but the game is growing on me somewhat. I think FIRST has produced multiple games that are better (2000, 2006, 2004, etc), but this isn't an awful game by any means.