Competition Penalties Idea

[Joe Matt]

I have been thinking about this one for a while now, and I hope everyone likes it.

One bad thing about a new games every year is that rules change year to year. While fun, some important rules change or are forgotten year to year. With this year, rules have changed after competitions about penalties, and that has made some people angry. My proposal is a universal multiyear penalty system.

The system has three tiers of penalties: game, gracious professional, and safety. Game penalties are when robots, human players, or controllers do something against the rules of competition. As an example from this year, a game penalty would be de-scoring a teta from a goal, human player not loading a tetra in the square, or load while not on the triangle. Gracious professional penalties are when a robot, team, or alliance does ungracious actions on the field, including but not limited to pushing a robot over purposefully, attacking a robot repeatedly, and other battle bots like behavior. And safety penalties are the biggest and worst, they are given when a robot endangers the safety of any human at the competition while on the field. As an example, hitting a robot while in the human loading zone, holding a tetra higher than the control station while behind the line, hitting or nearly hitting any human with a tetra or arm, etc.

Now, each penalty will be assisted based on the scoring object (the one most available) worth that year...

Game Penalty = 3 * Scoring Object Point (round up to next highest multiple of 5, so for this year, 3 * 3 = 9, thus round up to 10.)
Gracious Penalty = 6 * Scoring Object Point (round up to next highest multiple of 5, so 6 * 3 = 18, thus round to 20.)
Safety Penalty = 12 * Scoring Object Point (round up or down to next highest multiple of 5, so 12 * 3 = 36, thus round to 35)

In a game where a completed action is worth 5 times or more of a scoring object, 50% of the completed action's point value will be added to a safety penalty no matter if the team completes this action. 25%, rounded up to the nearest whole number, will be added to a gracious penalty. When added, round the scores to the next highest multiple of 5.

Here are examples:

Team A de-scores a tetra this year, they will get a 10 point penalty. ( 3 * 3 = 9 round to 10)
Team B nearly hits a ref with a multiplyer ball last year, they will get a 85 point penalty. a(60)=12 * 5 b(25)=.50 * 50) ) a(60) + b(25) = 85
Team C bases a team relentlessly in Stack Attack, they get a 25 point penalty. a(10)=1 * 6 (round up) b(14)=.25 * 25 (round up to whole) a(10)+b(14)= 24 (round up to 25)

Hope that made sense, you can just list the penalty amounts in the manual, and this system can be used when creating the rules.