A Recycle Rush Reflection

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Sunshine

Can you elaborate on why you feel this way?

Mostly because I use global team performance as a proxy for engineering difficulty per performance level. The contribution skew is the worst it's been in years, with more teams lower and some out in the stratosphere. Combined with the game's limits on contributions (essentially, it's really easy to get in the way), the effective floor to contribute is relatively high relative to that spread.

At the same time, those stratospheric teams are capped in the literal sense in terms of game pieces. I guess it's not so much that it's a low ceiling as it's a ceiling no one really wanted to break. This isn't trying to squeeze in another 3 assist cycle or nail the triple balance or design that 6 second climb. This is minibots: an arms race for a coin flip.

Originally Posted by itsjustjon

I meant simple in the fact that most (if not, all) robots this year are similar in design. For me, I did not see too many designs that were unique (One exception being 2122 with their table for resting an RC). All designs have same/similar intake style and lift design. They all do the same thing except some are faster or more efficient. Of course there are other exceptions that I didn't name. One other dichotomy is that either your bot does landfill or feeder, and very few bots do both. I honestly do not know what I was necessarily expecting but I just feel that there wasn't room for uniqueness.

This lack of uniqueness makes the game simple because the task isn't too hard. It doesn't demand thinking outside of the box. All you need to do is stack something. No more, no less.

I gotcha. Yeah, this isn't full-court frisbee shooting versus 10-foot pyramid climbing--I can see how that combined with the limited interaction makes things look very similar. That's not to say that, as Mark was, there's no devil in the details.