Quote:
Originally Posted by RRLedford
I was asking how allowing expansion at either tower would hurt the GAME PLAY, not how it would affect any specific teams.
-Dick Ledford
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Fair enough... I can't see how allowing expansion at either end of the field would hurt game play.
But, I think you'll agree, it would hurt at least one team whose robot is designed to benefit from that aspect of the rules and game play.
What you're seeing here, I think, is that many of us... one day... want to
be the team that has sufficient insight into the rules and the game that we are able to devise a unique solution that gives us a unique advantage. To us the game isn't just what happens on the field... it is what happens in the shop for six weeks and what happens in the school and community for a year. We are vigourously protecting 469's right to be dominant because we all want to be 469 one day, and have such a stunningly successful design that we cause a complete paradigm shift in how the game is to be played.
In some posts related to this topic I think some people have been a little more... vigorous... in their defense of 469's right to use the rules to their advantage than they need to be, but I hope you can understand why. Changing the rules to the disadvantage of a dominant team, for whatever reason, threatens the ability of any of us to dominate.
I think our resistance to a rule change is also based on years of experience seeing how teams react to a dominant machine. FRC is not a "static" competition... strategies and robots change and evolve over the course of a season. We've seen, perhaps, less than half of this year's robots. Lets wait and see how the game evolves.... its quite possible that 469 isn't actually as dominant as they might appear to be right now. They might have been wise to keep their "looping" mechanism under wraps until they got to Atlanta....
Personally, however, I want to thank you for presenting your argument in a calm and rational manner in the face of a fair bit of criticism. I might not agree with your argument, but I appreciate how you have presented it.
Stay tuned... and have faith in the teams... there is LOTS of exciting action to come without the need for any rule changes.
Jason
Jason