Dangerous precedent set by Q&A 461: Loaning Parts/Assemblies to other teams

[MrJohnston]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

Are you blaming the teams or alliance captains that execute the strategy or the GDC that designed a game that passively encourages this and provides the loophole to do it?

No game is perfect the first time written. Or the second. Whether we like it or not, the mere fact that we have a different game every year guarantees imperfections in the rules.

Our first objective as members of FIRST is not to win a competition, rather to demonstrate Grace and Professionalism while competing. If a team ever knowingly sacrifices GP in order to win, I blame the team - even if it seems to be allowed under the rules. A difficulty arises because GP cannot be perfectly defined for all potential human actions and different folks are going to have different interpretations of GP. To me, "Welcome to my alliance, don't put your robot on the field" seems rather un-GP. Heck, if you can do that during eliminations, you could do it during qualification matches, too. In half or more of our qualification matches in our first event, we would have done far better had we asked the "weaker" robots to simply sit and stay out of the way. We wouldn't, however, dream of doing that.