What's so great about defense?

[archiver]

Posted by Kevin Sevcik at 04/20/2001 12:17 AM EST


College Student on team #57, Leopards, from BT Washington and the High School for Engineering Professions and Exxon, Kellog Brown & Root, Powell Electrical.



:ulls on Asbetos overalls::
There have been a lot of posts lately about the nature of this years game and some people have suggested bringing back 2v2 competition. One of the reasons usually trotted out is that defense should be a part of the game again. I want to know what's so great about defense.
From my point of view, defense doesn't really add a very large dimension to the design of the robot. Obviously, most defensive strategies center around preventing an opponent from scoring. Inevitably, many designs springing from these strategies emphasize just pushing opposing robots around. Frankly, i don't see what's so creative, impressive, or interesting about this. I'll admit that some defensive designs are interesting, but these are almost exclusively de-scoring systems. Obviously, a de-scoring system doesn't require running into another robot at full speed, so that's probably why I like them. But I digress. My main problem with defense and defensive strategies is that I think they tend to generate hard feelings between teams. I actually think this is a problem with a competitive competition in general, but that's not my topic here. Like I was saying, defensive strategies cause lots of hard feelings, especially the physical pushing and blocking strategies. If you lose against a nifty robot with a descoring system, you're disappointed but you can say, "Wow, that's pretty neat. I wish we'd thought of that." If you're beaten by a team that scores one point, then rushes across the field to ram your robot and pin it, you're more likely to say "All that stupid robot could do was pin us. That was a cheap win." Granted, it's in the rules and it probably should've been considered in the design process, but that doesn't make people feel any better.
Plus, physically defensive robots are more likely to break other robots. Having an opposing team break your robot and then be rewarded for it really upsets people. I know from personal experience that losing to a team because their robot can disab;e yours through pinning, flipping, etc. is a very upsetting experience. I know that there's probably a couple of people on this board who've had that happen to their team... ::cough:: Jon.. BEST ::cough::
Anyways, so that's my argument against defense and more or less against 2v2 competitions. I think it just tends to generate too many bad feelings. I don't know about you guys, but I kind of like not hating, or atleast holding a grudge against, other teams.

Now then... :^) Let the massive replies commence....