[Bongle]

I started the season really liking Lunacy:

Likes:
-The field floor removed the advantages that most veteran teams had with regards to drivetrains. No more 8-motor, 8-wheel drives that had been refined for a decade. It was also much safer to test because you didn't have to worry about a high-torque robot spinning out of control and injuring someone. Robots could be restrained with a single person to test drive.
-The inability of dominant robots to really dominate. It required a team effort, which made alliance selection and scouting a much bigger aspect of the game.

However, after watching 1.5 regionals and the championship, I ended up strongly disliking it.

Dislikes:
-It's boring. This isn't so much a field or robot slowness complaint (I liked the low-friction surface so much I hope FIRST uses an only slightly-gripper version in all future games), but a crowding complaint. With all the trailers on field, it was near-impossible for a game to run really smoothly without bunching up. I never got the hang of being able to tell at a glance which trailer was attached to which robot. There was no flow at all.
-Much too heavy reliance on human players. I had the same complaint for the 2004 game.
-Game task was too difficult to automate well. Much like 2007, there were very few robots (in fact, I never saw one on Newton) that could score reliably in autonomous.
-It was hard to tell if a team had super cells ready to go. It would have been cool to have a weight-activated sensor on the empty cell hook that lit up a light above that human player. You could maybe only aim that light at the crowd so the drivers would still have to pay attention.