The cheesecake runaway

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

I can only applaud teams for their ability to work within the rules and come up with both effective and creative cheesecake recipes for Recycle Rush. 1114 and 148 had two of the best, and I wish we had been able to see the harpoon guns on the field.

That being said, I think and hope that in future seasons cheesecake will not be allowed to this extent. Teams should be chosen based on their ability and fit within an alliance...not literally the fit of a premade mechanism within their chassis. Seeing less capable teams chosen over more capable teams solely to operate a foreign subsystem disincentivizes striving for excellence for a large part of the FRC population, and instead encourages things like making flyers advertising how easy it is to commandeer their robot.

Again, I do not mean to slight any cheesecake givers or receivers, as they have acted within the rules the same way I would have (and did). But there needs to be some sort of limit. Having a game that didn't depend so much on a single sub-1 second function would certainly help.

Jared pretty much nailed it here.

I don't think anyone is blaming the teams in question, or saying the experience cannot be inspirational for the teams involved. The teams evaluated the situation they were put in, and each reacted in a fashion that best suited their chances.

We obviously do not want to take away the experience of working closely with your alliance partners and great teams on how to improve your robot. That is a core part of inspiration and growth for many teams. However, when the point is passed where the core functionality of a robot changes due to "cheesecake," we create a disincentive for teams to try and accomplish everything they can during build season. I find no fault with 900's decision to build a new drive base for cheesecaking, a decision that certainly took a lot of guts and that most teams probably would have shied away from. However, I'm upset that we were playing a game where a drivebase with weight and space to attach mechanisms became a more attractive pick than 50 other teams in their subdivision. I find fault with a game where the best thing for a third alliance member to do is use a device from another team and then get out of the way.