Do we want another game without defense?

[Hjelstrom]

Originally Posted by JohnSchneider

No defense is fine as long as there's more interactions. You can't tell me an FRC sized "Clean Sweep" wouldn't be fun.

Yes!

[BrennanB]

Originally Posted by dmorewood

I completely disagree. If you lost the can war you lost the match. Every single Einstein match was decided by cans. I think the fact that the match was decided in the first second ruined the competitive aspect of the game.

While this is semi true in principal, you may be slightly pushing what was actually the case. The team that got the most cans (even on Einstein) didn't always win. Was it a huge benefit? Yes. But you still had to score stacks. It just so happens that many good stackers also had good can grabbers.

Originally Posted by JohnSchneider

No defense is fine as long as there's more interactions. You can't tell me an FRC sized "Clean Sweep" wouldn't be fun.

+1

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by EricH

I prefer the '06-'07 bumper rules, myself. They were quite simple: You could have "standard" bumpers, or not. If you had them, they had their own weight limit. If you didn't, that was your choice. And you could cover as much or as little of the robot as you liked. '08 and '09 weren't bad, either--there was a certain percentage of the perimeter that had to be covered (though '09 forced a trailer hitch to fit in the uncovered percentage... ouch).

I like this. Relaxed bumper rules might help encourage more creative designs like it did this year, but it might hurt younger teams who didn't build bumpers because it was a drain on their resources who really need some.
Perhaps teams should be required to have a full set of bumpers possible to use, but are not required to use them on the field.

[Loose Screw]

Originally Posted by dmorewood

I completely disagree. If you lost the can war you lost the match. Every single Einstein match was decided by cans. I think the fact that the match was decided in the first second ruined the competitive aspect of the game.

That's why I bolded scoring and addressed canburglars in another segment. Scoring, robot/tote/can sets, were nicely balanced. Canburglars though, completely determined matches. I agree with you on your opinion. Cans were worth so much that it was impossible to win if you didn't get half of them.

[Josh Goodman]

What makes a game boring? The rules or the gameplay? I think if someone explained to me how basketball is played, I would think that it was shallow and boring, but the players do some incredible things to make it not boring and fun to watch. I found, naturally, that the more creative and effective the machines on the field were, the more fun it was to watch due to the focus being on how effective the offense was and not, like previous years, overcoming defense as well. The "typical" style of FRC game makes the game more exciting for a wider range of random robots during qualifications, but I'd be shocked to hear anyone say that the playoffs this year were any less exciting than years past.

In a way 2008 was similar to this game. Limited defense, less room to maneuver, and limited alliance interaction. I think games like this are refreshing every few years. I prefer games that resemble offesnive/defensive-style play, but I absolutely don't think "olympic trial-style" play should be eliminated from the FRC vocabulary.

It's all about keeping it fresh which the GDC has been doing for many, many years and my hat's off to them.

[Jay O'Donnell]

Originally Posted by Brandon Zalinsky

I promised in January to hold my judgement until I saw this game played. What I saw was incredibly creative and awesome machines playing an atrocious and boring game.

On to 2016.

This is so good I feel the need to change my senior yearbook quote.

[Chris is me]

I don't think it's absolutely impossible to have a good game without defense, but I don't think FIRST's GDC is capable of it.

For example, Vex Clean Sweep did not have traditional robot interaction, yet it was an excellent game. Not that there wasn't defense, but it was more blocking and less pushing.

[Loose Screw]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

I don't think it's absolutely impossible to have a good game without defense, but I don't think FIRST's GDC is capable of it.

For example, Vex Clean Sweep did not have traditional robot interaction, yet it was an excellent game. Not that there wasn't defense, but it was more blocking and less pushing.

I still think FTC's Block Party was the most balanced game FIRST has made for a while. Defense was an option, but at higher levels playing defense would lose you matches. You had to keep scoring, and there were many ways to score.

[Bongle]

I did enjoy not having to worry about full-speed ramming and other kinds of alliance interactions, but it definitely made the game less interesting.

I agree that an Aim High or "protected zone" model would be the way to go in the future if FRC wants to limit robot damage.

How I might adjust this year while keeping the base game still there?
-Eliminate the step, and make a single global landfill that both teams can access. Stacks still get made in completely-protected zones, but landfill tote acquisition would be a free-for-all. Maybe to compensate for the increased difficulty of competitive tote acquisition, make landfill totes worth double. Teams would have to be careful not to push landfill totes into the other alliance's protected area, or else they'd be inaccessible.
OR
-Allow robots to throw litter. This would increase the possibility and payoff of defensive strategies (load 10 into your robot, then launch them to be evenly spaced across enemy platforms), with zero risk of robot damage. Imagine a locked-and-loaded litter cannon aimed at a robot trying to lay down a stack, firing litter just as it looks like the opposing team is going to score.

[chapman1]

I tend to favor any sport that deviates from the American football paradigm of hurt or be hurt, and I suspect that some of this year's detractors really don't like it for that reason: they like the physical contact.

After all, this year was more a game of wits, wasn't it? If an alliance didn't win the match, it wasn't so much that they were blocked, but more because they didn't score enough points.

At the elite level, "defense" might have taken the form of an alliance not having enough cans - but those teams who saw that coming were the ones who excelled... not the ones with better defense.

I too didn't like this game at the beginning, but as it unfolded, I came to understand its brilliance. If nothing else, it shook things up: most likely, to prepare us for the water game :-)

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by chapman1

I tend to favor any sport that deviates from the American football paradigm of hurt or be hurt, and I suspect that some of this year's detractors really don't like it for that reason: they like the physical contact.

After all, this year was more a game of wits, wasn't it? If an alliance didn't win the match, it wasn't so much that they were blocked, but more because they didn't score enough points.

At the elite level, "defense" might have taken the form of an alliance not having enough cans - but those teams who saw that coming were the ones who excelled... not the ones with better defense.

I too didn't like this game at the beginning, but as it unfolded, I came to understand its brilliance. If nothing else, it shook things up: most likely, to prepare us for the water game :-)

It's not so much the physical contact: it is entirely possible to design a game with defense that _doesn't_ have physical contact of any kind. Large protected zones so that contact is optional or indirect ways to interact/interfere with the other alliance (like my littercannon idea above) open up a whole world of strategy.

Mathematically, you could say the problem many people had with this game is that the scores of the two alliances were entirely uncorrelated (until extremely elite-level play where canburglars mattered).

My least favourite games are those with the most-rewarding physical defense: 2003 (ramming), 2007 (ramming around the christmas tree) and 2009 (ramming on ice) were all not fun to watch as you had a kessler syndrome of broken robots turning into "defense specialists".

[indubitably]

Originally Posted by AndrewPospeshil

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.

Originally Posted by dmorewood

I completely disagree. If you lost the can war you lost the match. Every single Einstein match was decided by cans. I think the fact that the match was decided in the first second ruined the competitive aspect of the game.

We were only 5 avg points shy from finals having only grabbed one can throughout semis.

[alopex_rex]

My biggest issue with the lack of defense is that the game actually got more boring as robots improved, because the best alliances had the exact same match every time, which was great for them but got kind of dull in the stands. At MSC, the winning alliance had a great game plan that they executed every time, and that's why they won. The thing being, once you had seen one of their matches, you'd seen them all. It was thrilling at first to see amazing alliances racking up high scores, but eventually it was just like watching an assembly line.

Should next year's game have no defense? No. I think it should be something they break out every once in while, incorporating what they've learned from this year, to give a change of pace.

[connor.worley]

I think it's completely possible to have good games with no defense. It's all about the strategic options that the game makes available to teams. The best games are ones where there isn't one clearly superior strategy. When everybody is trying to do the same task, it quickly becomes obvious who the best is, and that's all around boring.

This is why I think Aerial Assist was a bad game. Every match consisted of three robots doing the exact same thing. One inbounder, one trusser, one scorer. If not holding ball, play defense. My proposal for improving AA would be allowing teams to have two balls in play at once. That would force teams to evaluate whether they want to take the offensive approach of bringing in two balls or the defensive approach of running double defense.

Recycle Rush really lacked any of this decision making. Grabbing the cans is an obvious best choice. Making stacks of 6 is an obvious best choice. Doing anything else will only hurt you. It makes the game feel like a 100m sprint.

So I don't think we need defense to have interesting games, as long as the strategies are unique match to match. In my opinion, defense without alternatives, defense with no opportunity cost, hurts games. On the other hand it can make the game more exciting if FIRST pulls it off right.

[evanperryg]

I didn't think "doing the same thing" every match was at all boring. I found the consistency of many robots to be very inspiring. Watching 1023 do exactly the same thing through all of qualifiers was amazing. That's the kind of consistency I have never seen in FRC, and it's the kind of thing that will take you far, even if someone else can put up more points. There's something to be said for a machine that works that consistently under so many variables.