FRC 2009 - Lunacy

[Katy]

I've thought a lot more about this game.

I still really love this game design.

I am steadily becoming less thrilled about the game implementation.

The orbit balls are probably one of the best examples of the difference between the design theory of why they were chosen and how they'll work out already. Orbit balls fascinating. They have a semi-spherical shape but are very different than any other balls we have played with. They are simple to understand but hard to design for. Good luck building rollers! Sounds about perfect right?

That said, they have huge problems as game pieces. It is unfortunate that they serve as such a source of frustration to the colorblind community, but their durability is downright terrible. We've had fragile game pieces before but we have never had a game where we anticipate so many robots going out of control that we pad the whole field up like a loony bin. To combine one of the most fragile game pieces we have ever had with a crash-heavy game seems foolish.

Additionally these things seem to not hold up particularly well under fairly normal abuse, if the threads here and the number of orbit balls which are broken in stores before you even try to buy them are any indication.

Orbit balls aren't easy to repair. We have had parts which aren't easy to repair before but normally those are not things we anticipate breaking. Realistically we are looking at having to buy a lot of orbit balls to compensate for a lot of little piles of broken plastic.

I'm shocked to not be hearing more people talk about the corridors of carpet along the long sides of the field. Those seem pretty important.

I'm pretty sure that, barring major rules updates about robot interactions with the trailer, that defense is going to be something people work a lot harder on than offense. This may lead to some very low-scoring games where rules like G14 get applied where a lot of people never thought they would. I also wouldn't be shocked if that whole "collusion" debate from Stack Attack came back into style...and man...I can't tell you how little I missed that.