[FTC]: Defense robots and competition

[Andrew Remmers]

Originally Posted by team F.T.C 4240

At the Maryland competition we had a defense robot on our alliance and the head ref yelled at us, telling us that.
"This is not the intent of the game, if you want to brake another robot there are competitions for that BUT this is not one of them, try scoring for once instead of preventing it".
So yes every competition has refs with other views of how the game should work but in our case the guy was 100% against defense robots that don't score so that was my experience from the Maryland competition.

I don't think that its the refs decision on weather a defensive robot strategy is the "intent" of the game. That certainly was not very professional of him. You could have probably talked to the FTA or the person running the competition.

I know as a volunteer refs have tended to be clueless this year for where I have volunteered at. They either didn't know the rules, refs didn't see extreme rule breaking and didn't penalize teams for it (our team lost in semi finals because of this), and the list goes on and on. But thats not the point, sometimes you just have to politely talk to the right person and get whatever situation is the problem worked out, I know from a personal experience volunteering that some refs don't even know how to score the game and missed something like 45 points that one alliance scored... I talked to the head ref and this mistake was fixed, It didn't change the outcome of the match but it certainly effected scouting information.

So weather your defensive or offensive, If a ref yells at you they really shouldn't be, YOU decided to build your robot the way you did for a certain reason. From a personal standpoint our teams robot once was pushing all the robots and some carts across the field in a defensive strategy and no one thought it was a "bad" thing as far as I know.


My $.02

Andrew