Quote:
Originally Posted by jgannon
It's no fun to get blown out, but if a team is going to slow themselves up because they're crushing you, it borders on demeaning.
|
Or worse, they score in your own goals. You aren't doing the individual teams of the struggling alliance any favors by highlighting just how much they are struggling to the general viewing public.
Instead of penalizing teams for outpacing those who struggle on the field, how about focusing on providing on-field REWARDS for any teams who find ways to elevate struggling teams behind the curtain? Take the Chairman's Award ideals and find a way to break that concept down to where it has an impact on the playing field.
Here's a wild suggestion....
You know how safety judges and individual teams are given "safety tokens" to distribute to those teams who are demonstrating strong safety practices in the pits? Well, perhaps teams and judges are given "Gracious Professionalism" tokens to hand out in the same manner whenever they witness acts of one team helping another in the pits with ROBOT-related activities. These can then be exchanged for whatever units of strategic/scoring edge the GDC defines for use ON THE FIELD, during the match.
- The helped team benefits by receiving better programming, machining assistance, better robot performance - a better opportunity to compete on the field.
- The helping team can exchange their GP tokens for a strategic edge in any match - they would hand it to a designated official (ref, queueing personnel, whatever) just prior to a match, and this would give that team/alliance an additional empty cell/supercell to use. (make it a part of strategy - we see that we have a tough match coming up, so we want to employ the token then to give us the best opportunity to succeed)
- Granting the ability to exchange these tokens in any match a team chooses will minimize their use against the "weaker" alliances they face. They will be used when facing the better teams. More available points in the best matchups seems to be an exciting prospect.
- Each team on an alliance can only use one per match, and the one they use cannot be from a team on their alliance. [Thanks, Bongle!]
- Your team would have a cap (3-ish) on how many GP tokens you could exchange for empty/supercells at any one event. This limits "collusion", "nepotism", and all other dark side of humanity issues many of you are thinking of as you analyze this concept.
- Once you use up your 3 tokens, you must politely refuse any further tokens or "regift" any excess - no hoarding of tokens such that other teams cannot benefit from them.
- The GP tokens would have the team number of the granting team on them to prevent any miscreants from exchanging their own GP tokens.
- Even the most inexperienced team would be eligible to receive tokens for finding their own way to be technically helpful to other teams at an event.
- Emcees and announcers would undoubtedly have to explain this concept to the crowd, which gives them a great excuse to talk about all the positive stuff that goes on "behind the curtain", which at least in my memory banks, is not something that is frequently brought up to the public while the matches are going on, relative to all the other discussion.
Could this not accomplish the same objective, and more, than the current rendition of G14?