[XaulZan11]

I'm not saying that different ways to penalize teams besides taking points away, will decrease the amount of penalities (disabling a robot right after it did something illegal probably will, however, as it punishes them right doing something wrong), but it will make the number of matches that APPEAR to be decided by penalties decrease. Instead of seeing a team cause 3 penalties for 30 points and saying 'well, if it wasn't for that team, we would have won', that team would be penalized by not being able to score/defend for a certain amount of time. Thus, it will be much harder to place blame and say 'that team cost us XX points'. While matches will still be determined be penalites, by punishing teams for penalities different ways, it will be more difficult to determine how much that team hurt you. It will also help my biggest frustration of seeing two alliance both play well and then see a 10 point penalty decide the match; instead of having the penalities 'hidden in the game' their contrabution won't APPEAR to have such an impact in deciding matchs.

I know that there are some problems with disabling a robot for some time during the match, but it was just an example. I'm sure the CD community can come up with different ways to penalize teams besides simply taking points away at the end of the match.