[Zach O]

I very much enjoyed the game this year, and would also like to thank the GDC! I think they set the bar high, with several tasks that robots could preform that teams had to decide which one they wanted to do in the very beginning of the design process! (I'm referring to moving, which should always be a/the top goal of a robot, and the decision to move over bumps or though tunnels or none at all) The game was relatable for spectators, fast paced, with so many robots moving between zones and scoring, the low scoring kept things close and kept everyone on the edge of their seats until the very end, and once we got to the very end, robots pulled themselves up into the air, what a great crowd pleaser!

On the other aspect I deal with, it also made a challenge for scouting. Sure, we still needed to figure out who scored the most and maybe who moved the most, but you needed people that could work well and compliment your robot, unlike in Lunacy where you just got the two highest scorers. No longer was alliance selection so easy for the unprepared teams, and the prepared ones collected their reward for their hard work though both quantitative and qualitative data, both of which I feel was needed more for this game then last year.

Not to be "that guy", but I just want to mention the camera situation. One thing I remember Dean saying at Kickoff is, "We think we have it this time." and that cameras would be used more in the games to track the giant vision targets and score balls. Now, from my viewing, I didn't see a single team use a camera to track and score balls. I know back at our shop, we had a test robot that we planned on having an autonomous program that would use the vision target to score balls, but we had issues with the lighting providing a false target. We got rid of the idea completely after we came to the conclusion that with teams flying over bumps, we'd get way too shaky of an image to be able to do anything with (which I find funny, because we didn't even end up going over the bumps). Just something to look at for next year's game, if they want to keep pushing the cameras, something I personally feel is very beneficial.