Are the three day builds affecting designs?

[JesseK]

Ri3D is a mixed bag for me.

What is very aggravating about Ri3D is that too many things they put out are big distractions for my team. For the last 2 years we have fragmented into multiple "competing" designs because someone saw "ooh! shiny!" on a Ri3D bot. This year it didn't happen for our intake because I wound up leading the intake and we had an effective design already. We even had time to make 2 extra spares by the end of Week 3. But man did it take forever to get to a final concept on the compound launchers (which aren't clones of Ri3D anyways) due to the distraction.

If my team couldn't come up with an effective solution to a specific game element on our own, I would probably welcome Ri3D (e.g. bridge lowering in 2012). Yet these last two years the team overall has been semi-derailed by the flash the Ri3D Advertising Blitz puts out.

Maybe I shouldn't complain. We did have a 90% bot at the Week 0 scrimmage (no effective catcher at that point), and we finalized a 2-ball autonomous prior to bag. Yet who knows how much better it would have been with more focus.