Do We have a trend here?

[RyanMcE]

I'm from team 492... along with 1031 and 957 we took the regional, barely edging out a very powerful robot from team 753. Their robot had been all over the field - they tiped over the basket case robot in the semis, and tipped over our alliance partners in the first match (a tie) and the second match (which they won)... After a few false starts, however, they were dead in the water - which was lucky for us, but also shows why the rule is this way. 753 had an intimidating robot that beat up the competition and hung from the bar consistently. However, their drivetrain broke and another alliance won - so who built the better robot?

Team 492 ran into trouble... we took the timeout to fix our arm (it worked out for us, thank goodness for that rule)... an when 753 took their timeout, they got something replaced but it evidently wasn't enough. They also took their timeout, but the timeout can also be bad, since it gave them false hope and they fielded a dead robot in two straight matches, when they did have an alliance partner that could have taken the field and made for a much closer final match.

I have to agree with those saying there is no need to change the rules now. We built our drivetrain to be powerful but nice on the batteries as well (we ran out in the finals last year), so suddenly changing the rules so that there were fewer matches would be extremely unfair to us, and any number of teams that built less powerful but very robust robots. Let the best robot win, however the game determines the best robot. We don't need to change the rules to achieve some other outcome... As long as the rules are applied evenly across the board, the game will determine the winners without a problem.