Did Lunacy really level the playing field?

[Jon Jack]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

The reason that there was a rim of carpet around the field was to get out of pins. Robots could be designed to get out of pins (stuff like swerve and a generally powerful drivetrain helps, which indeed did benefit the veterans who had them, but even that wasn't necessary and some veterans dropped swerve this year). Pinning was an issue that the GDC couldn't make more obvious was going to be a big part of the game, and teams that designed robots and strategies to get around rudimentary defense would win, big.

I don't see how relying on your alliance partners is a flaw for this competition at all. It's a team event intentionally; picking your team correctly is the difference between being a winning team and having a quality alliance upset in Round 1.

18" of carpet is not enough carpet to give a pinned team any kind of traction advantage. Look at how many 'shut down' pins there were this year. It's not like the drivers just simply let go of the controls and said 'oh well, we're done'.

Really, there was only so much torque you could put into these wheels before you slipped (Here is a simple lesson on why). So I don't know how much having a 'powerful drivetrain' helped. Having a swerve didn't help that much with pinning either. I've seen several swerve drives get shoved in a corner and shut down. The one thing a swerve did help with was strafing left and right to follow a goal or break from a potential pin before the pin occurs (exampe, 111, 1717).

When it comes to relying on alliance partners, I was referring to qualification matches (the elims are a different situation). This is a team sport, alliances need to work together. However having a partner no-show or die in the middle of the match should never seal a victory for the other alliance. I've lost track of how many matches I've watched with no-show/dead robots this year. Out of those matches I saw two, maybe three matches all year where the under-manned alliance pulled off a victory.