Why does everyone hate this game so much?

[George Nishimura]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Not remotely true - 2013 was often ineffective to the point of removing points from your score. Truth be told - that game was phenomenally designed. It was incentivized and scoring was easy. Furthermore the penalty for a miss was effectively 0 so there was no real downside to having teams try to score.

At higher levels some defense started to occur but, as evidenced by the world champs, the optimal alliance involved 3 robots running and gunning.

I think that's only really a third of the story.

Scoring frisbees was incentivized well, I agree, but that's also because it de-incentivized the other 2/3 of the game:

a) 2/3 level climbing was severely under-rewarded
b) defense was difficult/heavily penalized (namely through safe zones)

Essentially 2013 became about how quickly and consistently you could score frisbees in the high goal, which is a perfectly valid game. Straight shoot-outs were high-scoring, easy to understand for an observer and easy to referee (see FLL).

I can understand people describing 2013 as 'the best game ever'. It had few issues/controversies. It gave every robot an opportunity to show off. Better robots won out. For the most part, a single match was entertaining to watch. Every game should have these qualities.

But the depth of gameplay was quite shallow. The rules reduced 90% of robots to play one strategy: cycle + 10pt hang.

Aerial Assist is a lot braver. It wants to be dynamic and versatile. It wants more teams to think, talk and coordinate before and during a match (at least more than picking which feeder station to use). It wants to be more like a real team sport. Most teams sports have only one game-piece in play at a time as they cater for both defense and offense. That's what I believe Aerial Assist is trying to do.

There are two veins of criticism: criticism of the intent and criticism of the execution. Ultimate Ascent was executed very well, partially because the intent was simpler to execute. But as a fan of team sports, I personally welcome the direction the GDC are trying to take.