Lunacy Review

[AlexD744]

Originally Posted by JasonV

For those of you who say that auton didn't make a big difference I couldn't disagree with you more. Some teams had to think more outside of the box, I am not a programmer but I know that we would not have had much success without the amazing auton that we did have. We had over ten autons this year and the most common one was to start in one corner and turn and go to load up right away, when we did this we put 17 moon rocks into our trailer, thats 34 points that we usually had the oppurtunity to dump rather fast, had we tried to load like this during human mode there is no doubt we would have been pinned there or dumped on, however we also had a "hook" auton so that we could avoid other robots when we went to load up or we also had the option to get an empty cell during autonand head to one of the corners to drop it offf. The best example I can give of this is Midwest, we were the only alliance to top 1625,111, and 1675 in just one match but we did this by having them set up their robots first so we could decide where we wanted to put ours (think 06) strictly for auton. We believe that matches were often won and lost during auton.

Do you know how many times I told my team this and how many times they didn't listen and when they finally began to work on it Thursaday at Nats, nothing was able to be accomplished. I even was thinking that matches were won or lost in auto. O well hopefully next year.

[Peter Matteson]

The game had several good things going for it this year:
The new surface made veterans re-think their drive systems and in our case we built something we never otherwise would have and now have opened some doors for where we might go in the future.
The decrease in power needed to drive also had us focus on different types of mechanisms than we usually build because we had far more motor to run them.
The opponent controlled goal was novel and showed us the way to add some variation to the game that made for more excitement.
The human player scoring was something I liked because it made it so that there was nowhere on the field to hide and you had to be mobile at all times.
Lack of penalties are always good, as they say in sports, the refs could "let us play."
The supercell was a good "big ending" bonus and the weight of it was appropriate to scoring verses some other years.
The game piece was great because it was different than any other type of ball we used in the past and the plentiful quantity of them was great as well.

My main complaint is the game didn't pass the parent/grandparent/person off the street test, meaning it was too hard to follow if you weren't a FIRSTer already. If we want to grow and get noticed we need to be able to quickly explain the game and who is leading should be easier to tell.
Red and blue bumpers should have been banned to make telling alliances apart better.
If the field was bigger I think it would have allowed more movement making the game more exciting, but I doubt this works in all venues.

My other complaint is we were forced to play the game the GDC's way. I like being able to creatively solve the problem/game, but the last couple years our choices have been limited more and more so you see fewer why didn't I think of that robots and most of the game breaking stratagies are thought out in game design and removed through rules.

[kapolavery]

Even though this my second year of competition, I have to say that this is by far my best year.
A lot of people said the things I liked this year,
but here's a couple I wanted to say:

A lot of people complained about how the HP had too much of an effect on the game's outcome therefore veteran teams with superbly built bots had to compete with rookie teams that had an "ok" robot that could just drive around while they used their HP to score.
I thought that this was good because then rookie teams could compete on par with teams that have been doing this for a long time.

Another thing I noticed was about how rebuilding a practice field because of the flooring was costly and that's why the field should just be carpet.
True it does cost money, but isnt the whole purpose of FIRST to inspire engineering and to tackle any challenges caused by the game?

Basically, I enjoyed this year's game because it wasn't just a game. It had real life applications such as robots and humans interacting to get a job done.
It simulated what it would be like driving on the moon as well as celelbrated how far we've come/advances we've made since then..

but that's just my opinion.

theres prolly a whole list of real life applications that this year's game had.
and maybe too in previous years.

[Imadapocalypse]

i like the fact that FIRST tried to level out the playing field with this game though. in our rookie season the game was overdrive, in that game it seemed like you needed to have some sort of idea of the scale of FIRST. Plus we had no real building mentors >.<