[Vikesrock]

I feel that an autonomously controlled placebo would be significantly worse than any robot I have seen this year. This means that there would still be a large incentive to get your alliance partners working.

In this game a no-show team had a much greater impact than in previous years and in my opinion too much of an impact. The "placebo" bot would have done a bit to lessen this impact. I also think that the solution to this "problem" needs to be evaluated on a game-by-game basis. In the past couple year's games I would have left no-shows as is. The goals being attached to the robots this year made this game very different in terms of no-show teams.

As to the comment that it shouldn't be too hard to get their drive up and running this all depends on the complexity of the drive system. If a team overstretched themselves and went with a drive system too complex for their capabilities or if they went with a strange drive system that you are not familiar with this is not the easiest task.

For a small team like my team, that doesn't build the most robust of robots ourselves (yet), we do what we can to help get our partners running, but we can usually only send a person or two over and they may not be our best and brightest because they may be working on our robot. We have also encountered teams that refuse help or say that they're fine and then proceed to miss the match anyway.

EDIT: Also anyone that won a 1v3 match this year was purely due to poor strategy by their opponents and 2v3 matches should have also been extremely difficult to win.