Do we want another game without defense?

[AndrewPospeshil]

I find that although this was a much more boring game, the robots became more exciting. 2014 had plenty of robot designs, but it was nothing compared to this year. Now for teams this is really exciting - I think I squealed when I saw 900's cheesecaked harpoons. However, for spectators this has less of an effect I think. The difference between a field with similar or varied robots is fairly negligible to someone who doesn't know much about FRC robots imo. Still, it was incredible to see so many different, unorthodox designs compared to other years. Not only that but these robots could win - they weren't simply gimicks (148 is the best example). I feel that the lack of defense/interfernce and multitude of game pieces/tasks really created an incentive for teams to think out of the box. In theory every game should do this, but it's definitely not easy.

On the other hand, this game could be really boring to watch. Every game trends towards being boring in the first few weeks then becoming insane on Einstein, but I feel this year that just wasn't the case. Week 1 and 2 events (especially districts, oh man) looked pretty much like this: a tote would be dispensed, a team would take 30 seconds trying to put it on the platform, and repeat (this was another issue: teams without a gamespec element were pretty much screwed). Many teams could make small stacks but that was about it. Einstein suffered a similar fate, albeit at a much higher tier. Each alliance would make 6 or 7 6-stacks in their own little areas, and there was very little variation between matches. The obvious exception is the can stealing battles: they were great to watch. Our 35 second tug-of-war in Archimedes playoffs was the best part of any match this whole season. Einstein was determined by who got the best can-stealing selections - this is why the 1023/2338 alliance got knocked out immediately; their can-stealers just weren't fast enough. And even then, the can-stealing created an arms race that becomes a little insane imo. Karthik said something at his seminar about how the minibot arms race a few years ago got to the point where teams were using dry ice to speed up their mini bots' motors. This arms race was probably less insane, but there was lots of surgical tubing involved still - a dangerous amount of potential energy. I feel this arms race wasn't as bad, but still could've created a disaster.

Originally Posted by The other Gabe

I had no major issues with this game, except that it encouraged me to root for others to fail so that my alliance could move on

THIS one was especially bad. Now granted that comes with the upside (in my opinion, at least) of an average score system vs a win/loss system, but I hated rooting against other teams. I really miss last year when I could pick an alliance I wanted to win every match - this year we almost had to pray for our friends to drop stacks if they were competing for the same playoff spot as us.

My post strayed a quite a bit from the actual lack of defense aspcect of this game (oops!) but I really can't cast a vote. At the beginning of the season I would've voted a definite "no", but after this year's metagame evolved to accomadate the lack of defense I just can't. But I also won't vote "yes", because that just presented a whole SLEW of problems this year.