Week 1 Impressions of Rack 'N Roll

[WaterFreak]

Having spent 3 days watching matches & fixing robots, I am BLOODY exhausted!!!!!

Guess I have to agree on a couple of things....

#1 The Autononomous should have had a higher encentive, make it worth the effort it would really take to get it working. In MOST of the matches I saw, basically nothing happened in autononomous time. Even in the finals, only 2 of the 6 robots made any attempt to hang a ringer. Perhaps if a hung rung counted as a full vertical row or double points for any row it was part of, perhaps that would have triggered more effort into it.

#2 Ramping was a pretty huge thing, at least in the qualifying rounds. Come the playoffs, the teams that did well were ones with 2 good scoring robots & 1 ramper, with the ramper playing defense for the first portion of the match.

#3 The top row was pretty much not in play, all three days. Again, this could have used some incentive as the risk to attempt to hang rings on the top is pretty big.

#4 The spoilers ended up almost never being used. Seems that most teams were focused on attempting to score and not paying much attention to what the other team was doing.

#5 Lastly, seems the "best" thing to have done was pick ONE of the two things (ramps or scoring) and focused on them. Most of the robots that I saw that tried to do both suffered from compromise disease and ended up really doing neither one with much effeciency. The teams that won in NJ had 2 goods scorers (no ramps) and 1 ramper (that really only played defense). The finals was somewhat of a letdown, IMHO, both matches were pretty one-sided.

While this is NOT my favorite game, it is also NOT my LEAST favorite game. They always present challenges for teams to attempt to solve and expand the mind, think it has achieved that.