Late as it is for strategy, I was thinking.

[AmyPrib]

Originally Posted by rforystek

Sorry that I was wrong here. I guess I've held that misconception the entire time. Though, I do think it's very unreasonable that robots can break the plane of the field. I watched many at my regional swinging arms etc. many feet outside the field, and thought about what would happen if they hit someone. I even witnessed a robot holding a ball right over the hp area. Personally, I believe that a rule should be made about this, if you can't break the plane with your wheels, why should you with other parts of the robot?

Yeah, if you have swinging arms outside the field where all the volunteers sit, they can and will disable you. Not in all cases, but the refs certainly are strict on the safety hazard rule and will disable you if it's blatantly obvious you can hit someone. It all depends on what's going on. I've seen them not disable because they (the ref) were the only ones standing near it and not really in harms way (according to their own judgement), but if an arm is swinging around wildly near people on the sidelines, they will shut you down without hesitation. That is all up to the ref.

The only thing I can say about the difference between being in the ball corral, and being over the 7' wall is that, they had to do something from preventing robots being designed to deliberately reach into the ball corral to deliver balls, or whatever. That is a quick safety hazard due to the fact that hp's are actually reaching INTO the ball corral as balls come in.

However, there aren't many people out there at 7' tall to have the hazard of getting a 2x ball or robot arm shoved in their face at that height. In my opinion, since the design of this game creates long arms and vertical height robot parts, the quick over-and-back (across the top wall) movement of a 2x ball high up in the air poses less of a threat. I've seen robots out there that hold this ball up high while they're feeding balls into the corral, and while they do what they can to avoid being above the wall, it can happen. If it was a penalty, you would probably see more penalties called against robots pushing them into the wall, causing their arm to cross the plane.
Again, the safety hazard is the refs call and if he feels it's a safety hazard, he'll disable you.

oh, and btw, I would think most times if this were to occur, it would be over your own player station, so you would be blocking your own hp and creating the "safety hazard" on your own team (not that this excuses it by any means). But typically there would be no reason for an opponent bot to be reaching over your 7' wall over your hp. Not sure why you'd want to be that near to your opponents ball corral!