Thoughts on This Year's Game

[Anupam Goli]

I usually look at how audience friendly the game is, how "good' teams distinguish themselves from the "average team" , and how championships plays out before assigning a personal rating to the game.

I think this year's game, even with the nets, is fairly audience-friendly. We can talk about intense strategies and chokeholds all day, but the audience just sees machines throwing frisbees at a hole in the wall and robots trying to climb a pyramid. Normal people in the stands can understand the gist of the game just by looking at the field, and they don't need to ask any further questions when watching the game in action, since the general objectives are self-explanatory. Props to the GDC for designing another game where anyone in the audience can understand what is going on. This may be the most audience friendly game in a long time.

When talking about distinction between an "average" team and a "good" team, things get tricky. Logomotion was inherently a good game in my opinion. While it wasn't audience friendly, it was exciting, fun to watch, and championships was epic. However, (and I think the EWCP blog does more analysis on this point), there were way too many teams that could not score. Just look at some of the eliminations scores in various regionals that year! I don't know whether it was the nature of the game or the teams, but there were way too many robots that were 'designed' to place tubes on the top row, but always failed at doing so.
That being said, you only need to look at week 1 scores this year to understand that every team can score. Whether it be thanks to Ri3D and other open design logs, or the nature of the game, many more 'average' teams can knock a 2 or 3 pointer, and many times a series of those. What distinguishes an 'average' team and a 'good' team is the speed and efficiency of scoring cycles and the time of the climb. The game has been played out this brilliantly so far. In 2011, the differentiation between 'good' teams and 'average' teams in my opinion was whether they could put up a tube or 2 on the rack, regardless of their position and launch a slow minibot. Scores are high this year because of how many teams can score 20+ disc points and put a 10 pt hang. I don't think i've seen a game where so many teams can put up good scores or where the difference in 'average' and 'good' teams is purely in efficiency.

The only thing to complete the trifecta is a good championships showing, and based on what we've seen from the stacked events like Waterloo, it will be grand.