Week 2 Live Discussion

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by Michael Corsetto

Any game where you are better off not putting alliance partners on the field is a bad game.

What do you think are the contributing factors and to what degree of importance are each of these factors? In no particular order, this is where I see the issues:

-Disparity of ability: even with growing COTS market for effective robot design, some of the COTS parts fit design paradigms that do not exist in this game, or at least do not align with successful strategies of Recycle Rush. This leads to more manufactured parts by fewer experienced teams, more things that break or even worse, don't work, and budgets with little recourse to rectify either.

-Lack of fallback strategies: Recycle Rush is not a game where "fallback" strategies exist. Third partners with broken/inefficient/risky (I'll get to that later) robots do not have a role they can fill for the alliance except to not exist at all in some cases.

-Your Own Worst Enemy: Litter excluded, the game does not provide any real defense except for gravity and the incompetence/bad luck of yourself and your partners. By removing the lowest common denominator robot from play in some cases, their physical presence not being on the field eliminates variables and minimizes risk. For higher seeded alliances that are able to capitalize on the disparate play of "the field" they are up against, it makes more sense to minimize risk if the game looks in hand without them.

-Very limited field of play: this amplifies the other issues. Whereas the field of Aerial Assist was 95% open and flat, the Recycle Rush field loathes the concept of uninterrupted carpet. With two of the largest, heaviest, and most rigid game pieces in FRC history, half the field cordoned off, a good 1/4 of the field you can use covered in the bumps, plus the 2 feet+ of the landfill zone, there is barely any room for a third team to operate well if the other two alliance partners can run an efficient and successful enough operation by themselves.

There are other issues but I'm trying to get other work done and staring at CAD at 3:30 AM local time so I'll come back later