Recycle Rush Farewell

[audietron]

I am simply tired of the upsets, it is just a bit too much to take in all at once.
Also I hate noodles, they will all be destroyed!!

[Koko Ed]

Not so fast!
There is still the off season!

[Leav]

Not a fan.

Totes were a really good game piece choice: new and challenging.

Recycling containers felt a bit improvised but sure what the heck.

The pool noodles were a horrible addition and only added to the importance of the human player (which was already easy higher that I think it should be). The use of noodles as defensive pieces (throwing them so that they impede the opposing alliance) was annoying.

The 3v0 aspect made the game incredibly boring. This was again exaggerated by the can burgling, which apart from the noodles was the only competitive interaction between the alliances. Games were over literally less than a second after they began, and strategy had very little place on the field compared to previous years.


Good riddance indeed...

[Gdeaver]

Recycle Rush is not over. Love it or hate it we will be training our 2016 team on it over the summer and fall. Personally, I hate this game. Have from day 1. However, the engineering challenges pushed our team to methods we have never tackled before. This is especially true for our student programmers. Our mechanical team made more components than ever before. Did the mill ever stop running? So I hate it but it was good for the students. FIRST GDC, can we have just a little bit more robot to robot interaction and violence?

[Qbot2640]

I am looking forward to using the off season, and this game, to train our incoming freshmen and a few newer veterans that didn't get involved in the build this year...we'll build a second robot as an engineering challenge. That's the only real strength of this year's game.

As for the game itself - I will be glad to say goodbye. While marginally more exciting at the end it was still horribly boring compared to previous years. I particularly hated the treatment that autonomous received. All three of either totes or containers was a bigger challenge than the average team could accomplish, and even if a team did accomplish that, the point values were too low (all three totes plus all three containers should have been a game-changer...that was impressive).

As a FIRST program / team membership promotional tool let's compare: The last three seasons added to our robot repertoire (1) a robot that shoots frisbees about 70 feet with incredible accuracy, (2) a robot that throws a huge brightly colored ball 20 feet with similar accuracy, and (3) a robot that stacks tote bins and recycling containers. If you were a corporate official or a middle-schooler...which would impress you?

[Paul Boehringer]

Good riddance. I thank FIRST for letting me end my senior year with the worst game I could think of. But in all seriousness it was a challenge to build for, but the game play was just so dull.

(These opinions are my own and are in no way affiliated with my team's)

[Fanny Z]

A love hate relationship with the game. It was exciting to see what some teams could come up with but it was disappointing that FIRST created a game with flaws like:

-The upside down totes (Who really picked up these?).

-The co-op totes just adding to the clutter of the field after autonomous in the playoffs, especially if the auton didn't go as planned. (Not getting the 20pts)

-The pool noodles being everywhere, sometimes going unnoticed on the scoring platform, causing stacks to be dropped on them and falling over.

Overall, I guess I'm excited for off-seasons but I'm also looking forward for a better game next year.

[Shrub]

From the second I saw the game at kickoff, I was confused.
I still am kind of confused.

It was a weird, sometimes fun game to watch. People who were saying we'd get Lunacy again pretty much got their wish, I think. That's not to say it wasn't extremely challenging, and made room for so much more creativity, but a lot of teams I saw do well in the past had trouble with this game and vice-versa.

Now we wait for the offseason. :>

[Donut]

This game was more exciting to watch than I expected, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the race to stack the most in Einstein Finals 2 after the High Rollers managed to get the cans from 118 and even it up at 5 cans a piece. Seeing the end result of towering 8 foot stacks all over the field vies with a triple balance as the most impressive visual of the last 5 years (30 point climbs had that potential but were valued too low relative to difficulty to attempt for most).

Using average score was a good move. It won't make sense for most games and made for harsh quarterfinals but did a good job of finding your top 8.

It's definitely not my favorite game and is worse than the last few years in overall experience but I liked it better than 2009 - 2011, or its historical ancestor (Stack Attack in 2003). The two biggest game flaws were tote chutes and litter. Totes not landing upright coming out of the chute was the biggest barrier to scoring for the average team, it gave box on wheel bots nothing to do because the totes would come out awkwardly so they were hard to push, and for good teams it made having a tethered ramp or an internal tote catching mechanism mandatory rather than a competitive advantage. You would have seen better stacking overall with a better chute since virtually no one figured out a good method for flipping totes (see unused upside down totes in the landfill). Litter was also silly, as litter caught in your drive train could effectively end your match.

Autonomous requiring all robots to do something is a horrible game mechanic, and put any points out of reach except for those who could say "get out of our way, we can do it all ourself". A good number of alliances on Einstein didn't bother with it, that should tell you it's pretty broken. Cooperation is good to encourage but requiring the whole alliance to score is rarely worth it (2005 and 2006 end games) whereas needing only some alliance members but giving additional points for all results in more utilization (2007 end game, 2014 possessions).

Summary: not a great game, bottom third of games I've played, but has some redeeming qualities that should be emulated in the future. It will be overly ridiculed because it was radically different and brought an end to The Golden Age of FRC* (2012-2014).

*2004 - 2007 would have been The Golden Age but 2005 is smack in the middle of it, and was merely an okay rather than great game because of a poor autonomous and end game. I'm sure someone will correct me that it was actually 1997-2000 when robots were real robots but I don't know enough about the games in the 90s to say.

[Mrcope9]

Still hoping that this was all a dream and I'll wake up on kickoff day in January and hear about the real game. Hard to say this was even a game when the objective was to take out the trash. Hopefully we get back to wins, losses, defense, competition, projectiles, and actual sports next year.

[Lil' Lavery]

It was better than the last time we stacked boxes.

[teslalab2]

Originally Posted by pastelpony

Here's to another game with projectiles.

I don't know about anyone else but we flung totes a couple of time early on in build season... I mean... nothing........what..?

[Andrew Schreiber]

Recycle Rush, I filed a restraining order. Never contact me again.

- s

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

It was better than the last time we stacked boxes.

I wasn't around FRC then, but from what I hear, I agree. Next time stacking shows up, oh, around 2023, perhaps there will be three areas: red must stay out of blue, blue must stay out of red, and white is a traditional "bumper" area. anything goes. Scoring is in red and blue, and most of the game pieces are (or at least start) in white. Maybe a rule that you have to stack at least two pieces to bring them to the scoring area to cut down on canburgular type systems.

Average points was a good match to the "stacking/placement" game mechanics. It might have cut back a bit on robot-to-robot defense even if there weren't a step, since (during quals/seeding) scoring ten points would be more beneficial to your average than stopping your opponent from scoring fifty. Unfortunately, it makes finals at each event an inherently different game than the tournaments, even if the finals are "total points in three matches" rather than "two victories". For this reason, I prefer victory counts over point counts.

Nonlinear scoring makes for a good challenge. It also moves OPR from the realm of the uncertain to the often just wrong. Consider this: If OPR/DPR meant anything this year, every team would have a DPR very close to zero unless it had a good canburglar or a wicked HP noodler. Canburglar DPRs would be diluted further whenever playing against an alliance that couldn't put up more than three big tote stacks.

As for the coopertition and endgame, I found it strange how few robots coded up the "drive forward five feet" autonomous; I guess a shot at four points just didn't seem worthwhile. Coopertition was good, though I preferred the mechanics of it in Rebound Rumble. As part of the endgame (not the main game) it gave a bonus to both teams in the rankings in qualifiers, but did not change the game as significantly for playoffs.

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

It was better than the last time we stacked boxes.

That's because we didn't actually stack them in 2003. We attacked them.