Why does everyone hate this game so much?

[brennonbrimhall]

The opinions expressed below are mine, and I take full ownership of them. They do not reflect the opinions of other members of Team 20 (in fact, some of them are quite fond of this year's game and try to turn me around), or any other entities I'm associated with.

Originally Posted by 3175student17

2) 'fouls decide too many matches': While in Week 1, teams may have drawn fouls which decided some matches, that has been fixed. If teams are drawing fouls, they should be more careful, and READ THE MANUAL. Also, if you notice that your future alliance partners are getting fouls, tell them what they are doing and how to stop. When you are scouting for eliminations, a good thing to rank on MIGHT BE to make sure they don't get many fouls. There is a reason Technical Fouls are 50 points. THEY DONT WANT THOSE THINGS HAPPENING. Don't do those things. Also, fouls decide games every year.

If I'm interpreting Andrew Screiber's tweet correctly (found here, and assuming the usual Twitter caveats), that's pretty insane. Assuming the assumptions and conditions hold for a one proportion z interval, we get a 95% confidence interval that the true proportion of all FRC matches decided by fouls is in between 16.785% and 19.165%. Even though I don't have a baseline from previous years, the idea that nearly 1 in 5 matches are decided by fouls is crazy.

I theorize that most of this is due to game design. Teams are rewarded and punished for accomplishing the same tasks: possessing a ball could give your alliance a 10 or 20 point boost, or a technical foul. Similarly, catching a ball is 10 points, or a technical foul. The only difference in these tasks are the color of the ball.

Additionally, I've yet to see a ball pickup that doesn't go outside of frame perimeter and is effective. This leaves robot subsystems vulnerable damage from hard defense (addressed in the G27 update, but still an issue), and opens up a Pandora's box of G28 issues.

Originally Posted by 3175student17

3) 'if you have one really bad alliance member, you will lose': No. This is how most team sports work, so why should it be different here? It should be a team effort. In football, you cannot have just a good quarterback who carries the team. You have to have receivers who catch the ball. In baseball, you cannot have a good pitcher who holds the tem to one run, if your hitters cannot score.

In the case of a dead robot, it does halve the amount of assist points your alliance can generate, and potentially costs time in a dead ball card, the win margin (via defense), and completely changes the strategy for your alliance -- and while that's something that every alliance should be prepared to react to, most aren't.

Robots that have a propensity for drawing fouls are just as distasteful, but are even more likely to swing the outcome of a match.

So yeah, I'd say that a bad robot can really spoil things for the rest of your alliance, who are punished for choices they didn't make.

Originally Posted by 3175student17

Honestly, I think this game is one of the best. For once, you can be a 6, 7, or 8 captain, and not abandon all hope once you are set there. Upsets happen more often, defense is a viable strategy, and spectators are entertained. I would like to hear a legitimate reason that this game is bad.

My theory for why all the upsets happen is related to my previous point. In district events with ~30 teams, the 2nd pick by the #1 seed is generally a robot that minimizes damage to the alliance, not expanding the horizons of the alliance. And that robot can really ruin things for their partners.

There's been a number of execution things missing from the game. Hot goal timing and when robots were disables was messed up at some Week 1 and 2 events, but seems to be mostly fixed now. Today, at the Southington District Event, I saw some pretty obvious pedestal issues where the pedestals would light 10 seconds or so after the previous cycle was completed. And while competing at Tech Valley, we had to quickly modify our intake to not stall while sucking up balls that were over-inflated (within the scope of ambiguous rules; they were 26.5 in or so, as compared to the non-official spec in the field videos of 25 in -- the inflation guide is incredibly subjective, and the ball's volume, pressure, and other properties varies with temperature).

And, I can't tell you how many grandparents, parents, and spectators have come to me asking about how this year's game is scored. And that explanation is not as short, concise, easy to understand, or as intuitive as it should be.

My major complaint is that the level of inspiring gameplay is relatively unattainable by most teams; I've only seen it in Waterloo eliminations. They way I think the GDC intended the game to be played is only doable (currently; I'd really like to see this change) by the god-tier teams of 254 and 2056.

But all of that aside, I think the major reason that people have a hard time with this game is because the previous year's game, Ultimate Ascent, is widely considered to be the best game ever. There was incredible design parity, many different ways to accomplish tasks (floor pickup, FCS, climb, cycle), fair fouls, game pieces that were impossible to be oversized, have density discrepancies, or be improperly inflated, and incredible alliances that capitalized on each other's strengths.

And after that, who would be satisfied with a lesser game?