paper: Spanking the Children

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

I enjoy sports that celebrate good, clean, physical contact, like a hockey check or a football tackle or even an outfielder dive or home-base collision (while they're still allowed to do that). The excessive amount of "Safe Zones" in these three games made any physicality almost moot, becoming a game of who-can-score-the-most (NBA basketball anyone?). Personally I missed the robot collisions and rigorous defense of old. I find this game a breath of fresh air in that aspect.

The problem is that playing defense is significantly easier than accomplishing a game's scoring objectives.

If I want to defend, I need a good drivetrain, a good driver, and a robust machine.

If I want to score, I also need a good drivetrain, a good driver, and a robust machine (in order to survive the defense that will me played on me). And one or more game piece intaking/handling mechanisms, game piece scoring mechanisms, software and sensors to coordinate my mechanisms, an operator interface to control my mechanisms...

Hence, building an effective scoring robot is objectively more difficult than building an effective defensive robot. This means that there will generally be more effective defenders than effective scorers, in a rules vacuum. Games without rules to encourage scoring invariably turn into Battle Bots, where the victor is the last robot standing. As Jim explained, many early games suffered from this problem. A handful of games have instituted penalties and put the penalty risk on the scoring robot, which just tips the scales towards defense even more strongly.

Safe zones and other rules that put the penalty risk on the defender have evolved over the past few years as a way to tip the scales back towards a level playing field. Defense was still a huge part of the game in 2011-2013, but it revolved more around defending/hoarding game pieces than around smashing and pinning robots (though there were still plenty of big hits).