Quote:
Originally posted by Andrew
6. Instead of unlimited gears, sprockets, bearings, allow the use of anything in the Stock Drive Products or Boston Gear catalogs. Put a dollar amount limit.
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This is a great alternative to SPI. SDP does not have as much other things, but they have tons more power transmission components.
As for what was wrong with Zone Zeal...
Too many times games turned into shoving matches. This was interesting for the players, but not for spectators. Also, this tore up the carpet.
One main thing that was present in '99 and '00, but not in '02 was the fact that you had to be off of the ground at the end of the match to get extra points. Sure, FIRST tried to get us away from the goals by giving us points for getting to the end zone, but they did not expect so many extensions.
If FIRST would've given us 20 points for robots being completely off of the ground at the end of the match, that would've added another dimension.
Another thing about Zone Zeal that was different from years past was the fact that almost all of the required tasks were easy to do by a robot. Grab a ball and put it in the goal... fairly easy. Latch onto a goal and push it around... easy. Latch onto two goals and push them around... somewhat easy. Grab three goals... hard (the only hard thing). FIRST initially made the task of lifting a goal difficult (by only grabbing the pipe and flange), but then backtracked and let us lift the goals easily by the metal trim on the edge of the goal.
My wish for future years is to make more functions of the game that are difficult to perform, as they have with every other year before 2002.
Of course, there needs to be a combination of this sort of task challenge with a game that is easy to understand and watch by spectators... that's why we should play robo-basketball in 2003.
Andy B.