Quote:
Originally Posted by WJF2011
I actually disagree with you, the veteran teams and previous year's winners are dominating this year, absolutely. 2007 saw less veteran and usual winners doing well which is why i loved it. Think 1114, 217, 67, 148 and so on.
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I disagree, the annual winners continue to dominate, and will continue to dominate in the near future. However, this year has been an off year for more teams than normal, and it has thrown traditional winners for a loop. This the the first time since 2002 that 175 and 111 haven't won a regional, (only the second time in both of their histories.) If anything, this game has seen the most amount of rookies and under the radar teams show the FIRST community what they're made of.
The GDC did a great job of making the design this year up to the teams imaginations, but at the same time they gave constraints that kept the competition realistic to the actual engineering process. And as always, once we got to competition there was the standard, "Why on earth were we not smart enough to think of that?"
IMHO, this year had a great diversity of bots built around multiple strategies and interpretations of the rules and the end result was one of the most memorable games and exciting games. I felt this year, more than ever, to win, strategy, scouting, and robot design were equally important in order to be successful (minus the extreme cases like 1114, 217, and 469.)