Are the mandatory bumpers helping or hurting?

[Nawaid Ladak]

Originally Posted by sumadin

Most posts here show an great combination of GP and expressing a reasonable opinion. It is my opinion that this post shows neither.

You can still play defense. Even with bumpers. The difference is that now, instead of the defense being "look at us, we have experience, we can design a strong drive train and ram people", the defense takes the form of "we found a defensive strategy to counter an offensive strategy."

I also disagree that this makes robots look uniform. With coloring, and the fact you can use however much bumpers you desire (66% - 100% of the frame) and whichever shape you desire *cough*148*cough*, means that as with most years, robots look anything but uniform. Also, bumpers give rookie and young teams opportunities to add color onto their robot, without painting something that is likely to be broken or be worked on.

With your high speed hits thing, what a great way to be as anti-rookie as possible. Unfortunately, not all rookies get experienced FIRST teams to mentor them. Without any knowledge that some teams will be out there just to hit people as hard as they can, I am sure that many rookie teams would find it hard to do FIRST. You spend six weeks on building a robot, come to a competition all excited, until someone who has done this a few more times than you drives all the way across the field to hit you, to separate the "contenders" from the "pretenders"? I'm all for defense, if it's played intelligently and doesn't rely on brute force. However, if you design a game that can end up as a drive-train war, how do you encourage creativity? You're talking about all robots looking the same? If games end up as pushing and hitting competitions, all robots will look the same. And that will be a sad, sad day for FIRST.

This is why I like Overdrive. Even though penalties play a huge, excessive role, and some things leave to be desired, I still think that in many ways, it's a step in the right direction. Especially during eliminations, this is one of the more exciting and crowd friendly games I can recall. It also allows for a myriad of offensive and defensive strategies, with few of them relying on brute force and many on intelligent design, creativity, and strategy.

As for wedges. If you read the rest of my post (and I'm not blaming you if not ), I am not for wedges. They're another rookie trap, something veteran teams would know how to handle much better than rookies. They also lead to boring play (have you ever watched two battle bots wedges compete?), and to tipped robots. In my opinion, if FIRST is to encourage creativity, intelligent engineering, and hard work, then wedges should remain illegal.

i like overdrive too, but only in the eliminations, im not sure about crowd pleasing on thursday, friday or saturday morning though, i had a break on friday and i talked to my old mentor and he absolutely HATED this game, as i've heard from quite a few other people. I really don't like this game either, "defense is not knocking a trackball down from the overpass with 5 seconds left. its stopping a team from placing a trackball in the first place with 5 seconds left." defense is not keeping the trackball away from the opposing bots by rolling it away from them, but more along the lines of pushing that opposing robot away from the trackball. this creates a "king of the hill" setting. played in 2004, 2006, and considerably less in 2007. (2004 from the bar, 2006 from the prime shooting possessions right in front of the center goal, and in 2007, on the rack). FIRST doesn't let you pull that off anymore...

your point about me being anti-rookie is incorrect, i EXPECT rookies to be wise enough to know what they are getting into. there are rookies that know how to win, even without veteran mentors, they should have seen a couple of matches from the previous years to see what base designs have worked, seince those DESIGNS have been uniform because of these BUMPERS.

I would enjoy it if FIRST brought back the 2006 rules minus the <R43>(i think that was the wedge rule).

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by CraigHickman

Oh wait, that would mean that refs would be calling more out of contact zone penalties, from arm to arm hits, and so on. But they haven't.

Did you forget <G37>e?

e. Extension to extension contact between two ROBOTS with appendages outside the
ROBOT perimeter of the STANDARD BUMPERS will generally not be penalized.

[kaszeta]

I'm in the "it limits creativity" camp. I rather like how our robot last year was nice and round with rollers.

Originally Posted by GaryVoshol

Did you forget <G37>e?

Nope, didn't forget that. Most of the penalties (or lack thereof) that I was referring to are ones where the appendage contact is inside the bumper zone for one team. This is absolutely illegal, and can take a team out of the running for a match (ex: team 8 and team 254. I'm sure there have been many others all over, but that one sticks out in my head).

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by CraigHickman

Nope, didn't forget that. Most of the penalties (or lack thereof) that I was referring to are ones where the appendage contact is inside the bumper zone for one team. This is absolutely illegal, and can take a team out of the running for a match (ex: team 8 and team 254. I'm sure there have been many others all over, but that one sticks out in my head).

I can't speak for what may have happened at SVR, but at Detroit several G37 penalties were called - probably the third-most called, after G22 and G42.

[bestgamer]

i think they are helping the robot, because its protecting the robot from others..

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Katy

Yes. I actually realize now I constructed that poll pretty poorly. You have my apologies. This is because I don't want them to be outlawed, I just don't feel that mandatory bumpers are helping. What I meant to really ask "are mandatory bumpers assisting the league" and "do you want bumpers to be mandatory next year." If you look at the written responses the difference is actually a pretty big deal. If you do actually take your proposed poll at the championship please consider modifying the questions in that manner.

I agree that the written responses differ a great deal, but more people tend to talk about something they want fixed than something that works well (look at the news, typically negative regardless of the situation). While I don't want to get into that debate here, the current poll shows a very definite bias towards bumpers helping FIRST.
As for the Championship poll, that was actually Nawaid's idea. I'll more than likely be sitting at home during CMP.

Originally Posted by Katy

So here is my next question to individuals in this thread. You have explained quite effectively why you believe bumpers should be permitted. I agree with you as it was never my intent to say that bumpers should be outlawed. (I'll admit my opening post may be misleading on this but honestly I was just using shorthand when it was in reality rather inappropriate and glossing over an important distinction. My issue is mainly with the fact that bumpers are mandatory and additional weight and size are alloted for them.) Now, other than to define contact zone, which has been pretty widely disputed, why should bumpers be mandatory? Why does FIRST requiring them improve the league?

It prevents robots from harming other robots and field objects. Regardless of the claims of more aggressive driving, which are disputable at best seeing as there's no real way to empirically support either side of that argument, bumpers do shield both robots and field elements from damage. Any perceived increase in aggressive driving more than likely stems from the game being played, or more specifically, the high speed robots designed for this game. Even if the other robot does have bumpers, if yours doesn't you transfer a greater impulse to the other robot. People have already testified to damage being done when both robots have bumpers, this damage will increase as bumpers decrease. I'd like to see robot damage decrease in general, regardless of whether or not "rookie teams should know better". Nobody likes to see an event where half the teams are broken.

[Guy Davidson]

Originally Posted by CraigHickman

Nope, didn't forget that. Most of the penalties (or lack thereof) that I was referring to are ones where the appendage contact is inside the bumper zone for one team. This is absolutely illegal, and can take a team out of the running for a match (ex: team 8 and team 254. I'm sure there have been many others all over, but that one sticks out in my head).

The way the referees were calling it in SVR is that they were only calling intentional (what in their mind was not incidental) contact outside the bumper zone a penalty. While we made some outside the bumper zone contact in the finals, similar contact was made against us earlier in the elimination, and went uncalled.

We made a mistake in not tying our arm back until we deployed it in the finals. Even with the stop we had, the arm had a tendency to flip slightly forward, and extrude outside our frame. In the future, when we're playing defense, we will either tie it back with a something that will snap when we want to deploy it, or just deploy it immediately in the beginning of the match.