Problem with Penalties

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Adam Y.

You didn't think your argument out very well. The penalities are there to stop behavior that the game designers don't want to happen. If I remember the details of the 2005 game correctly that penalty was a safety issue which should be a pretty strict penalty in my opinion. In 2008 game the penalty was the minimum amount that they could give before the penalty becomes utterly useless. The game designers did not want people backing up to hurdle and then continue on.

Granted. But you miss the point. The point was the reasons people complain, namely the proportion of penalty points to points scored.

In 2005, 30 points was way too much or way too little, even for a safety issue. If it's a safety issue, disable/DQ should be the way to go, to keep the game safe. That has less of an effect on the game outcome and quite possibly only affects the team that committed the violation. Point penalty...30 points was, as I said, close to WINNING scores that year, at least in qual matches. So it's way too high, because that's 2 rows that don't share a tetra, or 10 tetras not in a row(and that's almost more than the best individual robots could score in one match), or whatever other scoring you like. It's either too low (safety) or too high (points).

In 2008, I'm going to have to disagree. One hurdle with line crossing was 10 points. Not many teams could do more than 3-4, and many could only do laps of herd, which gave 2-4 points each in maybe 10 laps. So it's a pretty significant chunk of scoring gone because you broke the plane inadvertently. I think they could have gone a little lower, but that's just me. See, you don't get an advantage from going backwards a tiny bit, and if you go backwards to hurdle, it's blatantly obvious. So a lot of teams were penalized for doing something that gave no advantage and had no safety considerations. (Different from 2005, where safety and defensive advantage were both on the line.)