A Recycle Rush Reflection

[bduddy]

Originally Posted by dcarr

In 2013, the following was included in the manual



There was a great deal of speculation that the incentive for climbing would be increased at Championship, but this did not materialize.

I think the incentives in Recycle Rush are overall more rational that the incentive for climbing was in Ultimate Ascent, so the chance of any score change happening is even lower. For that decision to make sense, the GDC would have to conclude that the benefits of making such a change would outweigh the backlash from teams who spent a season building and competing with a robot designed around the current incentive structure.

IMO, quite the opposite. Climbing in Ultimate Ascent may have been less valuable than some people thought it would be, but ultimately the game was fairly well balanced and exciting to watch. Recycle Rush, on the other hand, is barreling straight towards a 2011 scenario where top-level matches are decided by a single action that wasn't supposed to be the main focus of the game in the first place... and I'm pretty sure that's exactly what the blue box was designed to prevent.