Rubbin' is Racin'

[EricH]

Originally Posted by tcjinaz

There has been a silly amount of lawyering about contact for a set of rules released three weeks ago. Let's learn from the experience of others (NAYRU, SCCA, many more). The point of the exercise is to Cooperatively do good, not destroy the opposition so We can go to St Louis.

The ONLY lawyering that I've seen has been on [G28], [G44], and [G45]. Mainly, it's been because people just don't understand [G28]'s intent.

So, let's make the intent of [G28] perfectly clear: If your opponents are shooting from their key, collecting in their alley, or working with their bridge, stay FAR, FAR AWAY! [G44] only protects against other penalties; [G45] protects against misuse of [G28] to win matches--to a point.

Trust me, those areas are a whole lot easier to see (well, other than the very edge of the key maybe) than the Loading Zones we had in 2005. (Is that robot in contact with that triangle or not? Oh, crud, they just got hit--we don't call that, someone's gonna be annoyed to no end.) If a robot was in the loading zone and got hit, the penalty was so severe that the rest of the match usually didn't matter: the hitter would lose to the hitee. A really good alliance could overcome that penalty. Most alliances? Uh, not so much.

Regarding your comment about students looking for Robot Wars: I don't think that's quite as prevalent as a few years back. The questions about that are now being asked as questions, not statements disguised as questions. And this is where one of the rules you don't like comes into play: [G26]. You come onto the field with a strategy to play battlebots, the refs are going to call you. And bumpers aren't going to stop someone from tipping another robot "accidentally" if they really want to. They just make it a whole lot harder and therefore a whole lot more blatantly obvious.

What we really need, instead of a single rule that doesn't cover all the elements needed to have a decent game, is a highly consistent, knows-the-game-manual-like-the-back-of-their-hands ref crew. And before anybody says I'm dissing the refs, I'm not. We have those already (and they have to relearn the entire manual every year!). I'm saying what the next logical thing is.

What we actually really need is competitors who know the rules and their interpretations as well as the refs. As well as the inspectors. As well as the GDC, if that's even possible. And then those competitors need to play by those rules. (And I think I've made my views on easy-to-earn penalties clear already--like 2008's <G22> and to some extent the expected prevalence of [G28].)