Problem with Penalties

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by Travis Hoffman

I can most assuredly tell you that playing defense is possible without obtaining an absurdly ginormous quantity of penalties.

True enough, and I'll leave the discussion of the relative merits of offense and defense to the many threads that you referenced.

All in all, I agree that while an abnormally high number of matches this year were decided by penalties, and that put a damper on the "fan friendliness" of the competition, penalties are both necessary "evils" and something teams can avoid with proper training, practice, and execution.

This was the main point I was hoping to get across. If you don't like the penalties... don't break the rules. Yes, that was occasionally difficult to do this year, regardless of whether you were playing offense or defense, but if the penalties were not significant and match-deciding then there would not be much incentive to pay attention to them, would there?

There is a fine line between encouraging teams who are not as "capable" as others to step outside their comfort zone and try new robot designs and having offensive teams offer up haughty, harsh criticisms of those simple, annoyingly effective robots who choose to play the game in a different but still legal manner than the majority of FRC teams.

My criticism is for teams that did not make sufficient effort to avoid penalties (especially if they then complained about there being too many penalties!) Teams that did not make an effort to avoid penalties do not fit the category of "effective", regardless of whether they play offense or defense.

If my comments were construed as a criticism of defensive machines and stragegies in general -- and I could see how they could have been -- then my apologies. It did seem, however, that many penalties were called as a result of defense, played poorly. I observed fewer penalties called as result of offense being played poorly. One way teams could avoid penalties was to simply focus on going counter-clockwise as fast as they could and staying away from opponents attempting to hurdle. In other words... attempting to score was an effective strategy to reduce the risk of penalties.

Jason