Week 1 Analysis

[Woolly]

Here's my opinion:

Penalties:
G40's penalty should be reduced if the alliance at fault gained no advantage by running afoul of it.
G12 may need to be reworked to become like the pinning rule, to where you can posses the opponents ball for five seconds if the ball was acquired without the use of an active mechanism on the robot, but you must get X distance away from their ball before you can attempt to posses it again. That way if the opposing human player drops their ball in your robot you don't get the "death penalty" for it. EDIT: Also, the robot may not distance itself from the ball by launching it via a mechanism on the robot.

Defense:
Defense is always part of the game, but I doubt this is quite what the GDC envisioned when they made a game all about the concept of assists. Pushing matches tend to be the least damaging type of effective defense played, and what they tend to break (transmissions, motors, wheels) are more readily replaceable than all the frame bends and tweaks that usually result from these high speed ramming maneuvers I've seen. Usually once the frame is bent, the robot is never quite right again.

tl;dr push and bump, don't ram.

Though, would be interesting to put shock watches on some of these robots, and see how hard some of these hits are.