Game design /w surface leveling the competition?

[Wayne C.]

Originally Posted by DMetalKong

At NJ, we didn't see this at all. The winning alliance was 2753, 1923, and 2344 (Note the lack of teams under 1000). From my observations, the 'leveling' effect wasn't so much directed towards experience as it was towards gameplay. The sole strategy that seemed to evolve was pin and dump. In the end, it made matches pretty predictable, which was disappointing to watch.

I agree with much of the above but I must add that the real leveller of the alliances was the alliance random assignment during seeding. It seemed that some teams ranked pretty high because of lucky pair ups and some of the top teams really didn't seed very high (ex:1923) because they succumbed to rounds where a dead or poorly functioning robot on the field destroyed the chance of winning. In this game a single robot really couldn't compensate for dead robots on the floor and they were sitting ducks and auto didnt offer much reward if you mastered it but you were screwed if you didnt move..

The smash and dump nature of the game was kind of fun to watch. The initial rounds looked like old ladies dancing with walkers. But the action got faster as the elims got further. I can live with this game .....

WC