Not to jinx next year, but...

[Jay Burnett]

I've kind of been wanting a hockey game for a while now, Its been discussed for at least two years now, and i feel like it could be viable. Think field hockey pucks (so no regolith). There are various ways this could play out, e here is my favorite idea

1. Limited amount of pucks, 4v4 with designated goalies.
This works mostly like normal hockey. Both teams work with their pucks to score the pucks in their goal which is located in a space guarded by the goalie bot. 5 pucks in play at any time, slid into the arena by a human player at one of 6 feeder slots around the field. Three in both alliance section: one behind the goal and two on either side of the field of play. The in-bounding has to happen immediately after a score by the alliance that just scored. Each bot is allowed to posses 1 puck at a time, so potentially the other alliance can steal the in-bounded puck. The goalie bot isn't allowed to move from its zone, and the zone is not a "protected area", but only 1 opposing alliance bot can be there at a time (to prevent mobbing of the goalie and super easy scoring.) A path to the back of the goal would be left unprotected to give access to the in-bounding station there. the goalie bot can intake pucks (only one at a time) and can shoot them across the field or pass to an alliance member within 5 seconds.

Assists could be counted with multipliers that stack through the match for having different robots shoot goals to encourage cooperation and passing, (1.5x each goal for 2 robots each having a goal, 2x for 3, 4x if the goalie and all 3 other robots score. In the endgame we could add the option for coopertition. in the last 20 seconds, 60 or so pucks could be released into each side of the field (its illegal to grab other alliances' endgame pucks) and could be scored in high bins on your side, or in another bin in the middle of the bin for 10 co-op points (+ the score for scored pucks in the bin) extra per alliance that scores in their co-op bin.

The advantages of this are having good amounts of defense possible, both through goalies and other non-goalie robots, but not too much thanks to incentives to scoring and therefore getting close to the goalie and distracting it as opposed to defending entirely, and also the semi-protected status of being in the opposing goalie zone (play goes from to 1v1 in terms of defense in the zone, but with the trade-off of less maneuvering room) FIRST gets its coopertition in two aspects, rookie teams can defend but probably won't be able to wreck a good alliance's scoring, and everyone else gets an endgame and a frozen water game ;P