Quote:
Originally Posted by BrendanB
In a way, it is kinda hard because I believe that teams that can score in autonomous don't get enough recognition/reward for doing so. There should be at least some reward/bonus for doing so.
I don't believe that it changes the designs that get advantages, as they have gone out and done some really hard programming. Plus, it doesn't encourage human player scoring as that is what most HP's do already. If you look at some matches in which robots score in autonomous, they many times have more points than their opposing alliances HP scores.
My $0.02
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Teams certainly get recognized for scoring in autonomous. That is why Team RUSH picked More Martians in Curie. The reward is the fact that you already scored when the game starts. If you decide that that is a viable strategy, good job executing it. Seeing as how teams already see it as a viable strategy (otherwise they would not have pursued autonomous scoring), is there any reason to make it more beneficial?
As for the X marks the spot idea, I dislike it. The first reason is that, as I understand it, the X will leave you in a spot unable to do anything productive in autonomous. Also, being encouraged to hold still somewhere is just going to make it easier to have human players to score on you. From my point of view the disadvantages outweigh the benefits of parking on one of these Xs. Depending on where they are placed, this also encourages toploading, because it is possible you can stop on one to topload.
I simply see no benfit to either rule change. If you look at past rule changes at events like IRI, they often augment existing challenges in the game, not create new ones like the X. Also, the last time they changed autonomous was in 2007 when they added a 15 point bonus for scoring a Keeper. However, this was already the only goal that year, so it was what teams attempted to do throughout build season. It wasn't encouraging or discouraging any other common behavior during autonomous, like how adding a bonus to scoring would discourage loading.