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Unread 01-04-2008, 01:53
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Re: Look Back: Week 5

In an effort to make this game more "crowd friendly", I think the game designers wanted to reduce or nearly eliminate defense as a strategy and make it look more like NASCAR where there are bots just zooming around the field racing across the finish lines. I believe this concept is flawed for several reasons...

1) Basically, if it's "the team with the most firepower/speed wins" - which is what a purely offensive game really is, then I can tell you who will win before the match starts. The score will just show the faster / more-hurdling team getting farther and farther ahead until the two minutes of "fun" is over and one team has 100+ points while the other has oh, maybe 20 or so. Yahoo. Not a lot of crowd appeal there! You would hardly need to watch any match with say 3 hurdlers against 1 or even two good ones against one good one. It's like a basketball game where two guys on one team get to shoot baskets with each having their own ball, and only one on guy on the other does - oh, and there's no defense allowed! Just grab the balls and keep pumping them in. No suspense, not much strategy, and not much fun to watch.

2) Because there are so many rookie teams who can't hurdle, they have to do something. Without doing defense what are they left with? Lapping. Okay, it takes 5 laps to equal 1 hurdle. Even a basic hurdler that does it twice forces his counterpart to make 10 laps to tie him. If he places at the end, you can forget it. Where does that leave all the rookies and teams that can't hurdle? What do you want them to do?

3) If they really wanted it to be only speed and offense, then they needed to make the hurdles worth 4 and laps worth 2. Then you'd see an entirely different game. I'm glad they didn't because it wouldnt' reward the effort of making a hurdler, but it would eliminate the need for ball pinning, or anything else - it would just be a race.

4) The crowd appreciates defense! Imagine ANY game or sport with multiple players without defense. Basketball, football, hockey, baseball, even NASCAR has defense (people don't always politely move aside and let the faster car just go by). That's what makes the offense worthwhile! Heck if there's no defense, then you just run down the field and score a touchdown every play, right? That's not football, that's track and field!

5) Defense = strategy. It's a real challenge figuring out how to "counter" an offensive superpower, or how to team up maybe 2 on 1 (like Basketball or Football) to try and win. It makes even a slow lapbot feel worthwhile. We played with a team last weekend that could not hurdle or knock, and could only do two or three laps per match! It was tough trying to make that work for us, but we had them pin a ball and they slowed down our opponents and made a real significant contribution to the alliance! Take away their ability to defend, and you might as well tell them to go home and come back next year.

Bottom line is that you need both: offense - to be appreciated for the beauty and speed of racing around the track, or grabbing the ball effortlessly and hurdling so fast they hardly have to slow down, and defense to counter the scorers and make them WORK for their points and have to dodge traffic and race or even fight for the balls. I think that's what makes the game really exciting.
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Last edited by FoleyEngineer : 01-04-2008 at 01:57.
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