Quote:
Originally Posted by dlavery
OR -- we have FIRST adopt an even better strategy that makes both the annual shipping nightmare and the withholding allowance unnecessary. VEX, FTC and Lego League figured it out long ago. FRC just has to catch up.
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As a VEX mentor I like the VEX system of bring your robot and compete with it. We do four events a year. After the first event 75% of the robots get completely disassembled and rebuilt. After the second event about 50% of the robots start from scratch. So across the season, the robots get better. The later competitions (like the Mid-Atlantic this weekend and the Eastern PA regional in March) see some very competitive robots that have been reworked (and re-reworked). At $75 an event and having 6 to pick from an hour drive from home makes this possible.
On the other hand I love the FRC ship by 5PM Tuesday or don't play. It's a real deadline. It has real meaning. It's kind of like the real world, it's got to ship so make it work. And at $6K an event it's hard to go to many of them a year. So it makes the playing field somewhat level. Our team goes to two events. We do an early event (Hello FLR!) and learn a lot. We revamp, fix, change and bring parts to make our robot better at the second event (Yo Philly!). We would do that even if limited to 5LBS of parts.
I applaud the GDC on the 65LB rule for 2010 to help the snowbound. I applaud the GDC for the "hey, don't bring assembled robots it annoys the following people ..." transparency. I applaud those of you who will follow the spirit that it was done in, after all at the end of the day, it's only a game.
So keep the withholding, next year drop it back to 40LBS or so, getting a chance at Rev2 helps. Bag and Tag sounds like a possible second solution if FIRST can get the OK to bring fully assembled robots. But the hassle of 60 teams AND 60 robots makes my head hurt.
And I'll follow Dave's suggestion on the ignore button for the others. ('cause I'm sure I'm on many ignore lists)