Team Update 1-17-2014

[Mr. Van]

Originally Posted by BigJ

Nothing needs to be "fixed"...

If your robot is designed to catch at any time, that is your design decision, and you need to stay away from the opponent's balls. If you want to be in the mix pushing people around, especially when your opponent is trying to TRUSS/CATCH, your robot better not be able to catch balls.

What if you are the team trying to TRUSS/CATCH?

Is catching now not only a design challenge, but a high risk strategy? I don't think that the intent of the game was to deter teams from catching balls. This seems to be equivalent to a rule that stated "a high goal shot that hits the player station wall but does not enter the goal will be a penalty". If this were a rule, would you take the risk hope you never miss a shot?

Is anyone going to design a catching robot knowing that any random bouncing opponent ball could potentially cause a penalty? I know that this change (that you can't eject an opponent's ball from your robot without a penalty) is causing us to question the validity of a catch at all...

- Mr. Van

PS - If making "assists" is now more difficult (because an opponent is able to simply bump the ball away from you as you try to pass from one robot to another), then this
makes me fear that this game may dissolve into most robots playing defense against each other and traditionally strong teams running the field by themselves bypassing any assists (inbound, truss, high goal - 20 pts/cycle - repeat - while everyone else is in shoving matches).

[BigJ]

Originally Posted by Mr. Van

What if you are the team trying to TRUSS/CATCH?

Is catching now not only a design challenge, but a high risk strategy? I don't think that the intent of the game was to deter teams from catching balls. This seems to be equivalent to a rule that stated "a high goal shot that hits the player station wall but does not enter the goal will be a penalty". If this were a rule, would you take the risk hope you never miss a shot?

Is anyone going to design a catching robot knowing that any random bouncing opponent ball could potentially cause a penalty? I know that this change (that you can't eject an opponent's ball from your robot without a penalty) is causing us to question the validity of a catch at all...

- Mr. Van

PS - I'm beginning to fear that this game may dissolve into most robots playing defense against each other and traditionally strong teams running the field by themselves bypassing any assists (inbound, truss, high goal - 20 pts/cycle - repeat - while everyone else is in shoving matches).

I'd argue that if your robot is in a configuration in such that it could catch a ball, the burden is on you to be aware of where both your and the opponent's ball is and make sure you don't catch the opponent's ball. These aren't "random bouncing balls", there is one ball of each color to keep track of.