Do We have a trend here?

[Swan217]

Whatever the intent of the rules are, if you break them then you should be penalized. It doesn't matter if you're an inch into the goal or a foot, you're still violating the rules. It's like when you're driving, whether you're going 5 over or 20 over you're still breaking the law. The intent there is to stop unsafe fast driving, yet you can still get a ticket for only going 5 over. Thus, the call must be made.

You could see that the penalties had a positive effect on the drivers - during the Elims I only called one team for "breaking the plane." So if the drivers learn to drive safer, I believe I did a good thing calling the close ones earlier. Calling the close ones lowered the chances of having someone being hurt later on a big violation.

As for the damage rule, there is a VERY fine line between legal "blocking" and illegal entanglement, damage, destruction, etc. There were a few times when I wanted to call a robot for pinning another one, but since the other robot could still move, even if it couldn't go where it wanted to, it wasn't considered pinning.

I can't speak for referees at other regionals, but at the GLR where I was refereeing, we gave one warning to teams with unsafe features, and thankfully the teams took them into consideration. I didn't see any robots that damaged other robots on purpose, and for robots that had questionable intentions, I would have disabled if their actions resulted in actual damage.