Intentionally blocking traffic in Hybrid

[Cory]

Originally Posted by jgannon

Regardless of the ramming team's intent, high-speed ramming penalties exist to protect the other robots from damage.

<G37> (as follows) would disagree to an extent:

a. High speed accidental collisions are likely to occur during the MATCH, and are an expected part of the game. However, high-speed intentional (emphasis mine) ramming is not acceptable and will be penalized.

It says quite clearly in no fewer than 4 places throughout G37 that robots must be designed to withstand high speed collisions as this is a high speed game.

It seems to me the entire point of G37 is to keep robots as it says, from pursuing strategies involving intentional damage or destruction of opposing robots. It clearly makes reference to accidental collisions at high speed being expected, and the necessity for teams to make robust robots due to such high speed interaction.

The only mention of handing out a penalty for high speed ramming is when the offending team intentionally does so. I will admit that intent is nearly impossible to judge normally, but I think during hybrid intent is quite clear.

For example, a robot with an excellent hybrid mode who nearly always crosses 3-4 lines is not going to collide with a team on purpose. That would be totally counterproductive towards their own scoring. Therefore if they collide with another team, I would assume it was incidental.

My concern lies almost exclusively with teams who have the intent to block the lane in their own home zone.

I guarantee that with certain teams very effectively shutting down all traffic in their home zone by parking 3' out in front of the lane divider, this will become a prominent strategy by many teams who have weak hybrid modes.

If this becomes common, sooner or later some team with a good, fast hybrid mode (such as 1114, or 1024, or others that we saw this weekend) is going to collide with the blocking team at high speed.

Is the team who is trying to score points in hybrid by effectively completing the task at hand going to be penalized for ramming a team that quite clearly intended to do nothing more productive than ruining the hybrid routines for the other alliance? If so, I will be extremely unhappy.

As long as the GDC wants to let teams impede others in hybrid (which seems to be what update 2 and 5 are saying), it seems entirely unfair to punish a team which may collide with them.