Why does everyone hate this game so much?

[Travis Hoffman]

Originally Posted by Oblarg

To be fair, nothing in that clip even remotely resembles battlebots. All I saw was unintentional entanglement and resulting (unfortunate and nigh-unavoidable without banning defense) damage. Additionally, throwing around words like "idiocy" is not particularly conducive to the sort of atmosphere required for productive discourse.

Edit: It just occurred to me that I might be mis-parsing your response if you intended that as an example of receiving a penalty while not playing "like battlebots." It's really rather unclear; the sentence directly after indicates you think the reffing against overly-aggressive robots is insufficiently strict, not vice-versa.

I was unclear. The "tech foul" we received in Pittsburgh was not really the target of my "battlebots" implication. It was, however, the result of careless gameplay on behalf of an aggressor where a robot positioned their claw in a hazardous manner when playing defense. They snagged themselves on our bot during this incursion, and we were penalized for extracting ourselves from this situation to continue to play the game.

To their credit, the team that received the benefit of this penalty apologized to people in our pit, saying they realized they were in the wrong. I hope they learn to translate that remorse into improved gameplay on the field.

To my discredit, I blew up verrrrrrry overtly in the pit over this whole situation, to the point I felt it necessary to leave the venue for an extended period, including Friday closing ceremonies. As I've said elsewhere, this game and my personality are a "toxic combination." The rest of the team handled the situation in a much better manner than I did.

The "battlebots" I was referring to actually occurred in Wisconsin, and went unpenalized all weekend (at least the "ripping wires", etc. stuff that happened to us in multiple matches on Saturday).