[annie1939]

Towards the end of the qualifying matches, one of our alliances decided to go for coopertition points. Our driver had been hesitant to try the idea earlier, but everyone had been talking about it during the day. So the teams decided to try it. Nothing else was working. Five robots were trying to get balls into the same goals. One opponent robot stayed on defense. They still only managed 3 points and 2 were from our alliance. It was very frustrating.

Ball handling is an interesting engineering problem, but that subtlety is lost on the audience. We also need games with the drama to draw them in, and I don't think they got it right this year. The finals were more exciting, but for the first day and a half it was about missed kicks and trying to get balls out of the corners.