Effect of Coopertition Points

[thefro526]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

And this is bad because...?

Seriously, if you don't like the idea of being handicapped by a deficient opposing alliance, do something about it. Don't just gripe about the situation. What can you do, you ask? The answer should be obvious: help your opponents to be good.

This is a bit more complicated than just helping your opponents do well. In previous years, I have helped both partners and opponents with their machines, often doing things as simple as helping them get their drive working (2009 comes to mind) or as complicated as helping them with code/electrical etc. Usually, in previous games, it was just about getting the robot to move and with some sort of degree of control so that the machine could at least positively contribute to the scoring efforts and or strategy in a given match - 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were easy in regards to this, as long as the machine moved, it could do SOMETHING.

Looking at this year and the bridges, helping every one of your opponents, or lets say a reasonable number of them would be a daunting task. There are many, many teams that built robots that aren't capable of climbing bridges reliably or even at all, and we're not talking about easy fixes either. Teams used the wrong wheels, wrong gearing, the frame geometry impedes with the bridge, CoG is too High, etc - fixing any one of those problems is much more than one would expect to do for any single opponent for a single match.