On Rules, Referees, and Rewards (aka Penalties)

[RyanMcE]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

I agree that designing a completely penalty free game is incredibly difficult. It's just an ideal to strive for and judge a game against. Penalties can still be minimized. The loading zones this year obviously necessitated penalties to protect them since they're such obvious defense points. If your game has such obvious points of weakness, they should be removed instead of protected with penalties. If at all possible.

Thats a good point Kevin. They knew that the loading zones would be where defense takes place, so they implemented penalties to prevent that. I am trying to think of an alternate method to penalties - or an alternate game setup that might ahve worked with the particualr game we have this year. The only thing that has come to my mind so far is to ahve all the tetras out on the field at the start of the match somehow. I dunno.

On the other hand, even in games like football, there still are penalties (not in points, but in yards) to make sure the game doesn't get out of hand. I'd like to restate that if FIRST allows too much "defense" (I say it in quotes because its funny to me that "defense" is attacking other robots) then the same robot could win year after year. Thats not the point of the competition, in my opinion. Rather, the point is to force teams to come up with novel solutions each year.

Now, this year I think they have done that well, because the robots that I have seen that are actually good at defense have to be suited to the game still. And penalties made that possible. So its a tough call. Certainly, it would eb ideal to not ahve to have any penalties. But the way teams play these days, I think the game designers would be hard pressed to come up with a game without penalties where "defense" wouldn't be the only way to win.