Team Update 2-19 and FRC Blog - Week 0 Observations and Stop Build Day

[Donut]

Originally Posted by SM987

Given that it's stop build day, I haven't seen anyone overreact. That said, this is a minor plus for climbers and a minor bummer for floor loaders. I don't see it being a huge issue in anything but the highest level of competition.

I think this could have a drastic effect in low level qualification matches. Say you are a floor loader and are partnered with two robots with broken/inoperable/nonexistent shooters; the only method of getting frisbees is to get them from the loading station yourself, pick up the handful on your side of the field at the start of the match, or have human players throw them in the last 30 seconds. That last option is now gone, which means there is no way to get a suddenly large influx of discs that your rapid fire shooter can score. If you're going up against a good alliance that round what was already a difficult qualification match to win just became almost impossible.

The changes at the highest level of competition are up in the air to me. At the highest level most of the shooters would be very accurate and many teams would probably have floor pickups, which means there are likely to be few if any missed shots lying around before the last 30 seconds. Depending on how defense plays out this year though the alliance may have already exhausted most of the 45 human loading frisbees, in which case there's no difference since there is nothing to throw. I think the effect on the high level will be dependent on how effective defense is.