'02 or '03 Game

[Jeff Waegelin]

Well, I'd have to say I liked the 2002 game better. Why, you ask? Three reasons:

1. The 2003 game was too dependent on alliance partners.

In 2002, we could easily score 50 points unassisted. If we had a good partner, we could get a real high QP score, but even in a 2v1 situation, a good team could hold their own. Not so in most cases this year. Double-teaming could beat most teams in terms of stack or ramp defense. This made the rankings entirely too dependent on luck for my tastes. In Ypsilanti and Houston, my team got good luck and seeded #2. In Chicago, though, we personally played better than any time, but our pairings in the qualifiers really hurt our rankings. While this game wasn't as bad as 2001 in that respect, it was still not as easy to play alone as 2002 was.

2. The incentive for just pushing things was too high

While this was my team's strategy, and I'm not complaining too much, I think that there was little incentive for doing anything other than crash around and hit things. While there was exciting battles between teams for stacks and the top, things like stacking ultimately proved to be pretty useless. While balls weren't the biggest thing last year, they were a much bigger factor than stacking. This year's game was essentially just a game of attack and defend.

3. Elimination rounds were awkwardly handled

This has been beaten to death in other threads, so I won't go too in-depth, but essentially, I felt that the EP system was confusing, hard to deal with, and promoted things like de-scoring that just don't make much sense in any other context. In my mind, FIRST should have kept the best-of-three format. It would've promoted actual match play in every round, instead of one big round followed by massive de-scoring.

Well, that's my $0.02 on that matter. In the end, I liked both games, but if I had to pick, the 2002 game definitely wins out.