paper: Spanking the Children

[mathking]

I will preface this by saying this game has really grown on me. I found the matches at Crossroads by and large to be very exciting. I think Taylor's parallel to soccer is apt. I don't think the GDC was anticipating no defense. I think they said at kickoff and in the rules that we should expect vigorous game play. I have only been to one regional, but have watched (online) over a hundred other matches watching the teams of friends and 1014 alums compete. The parents and teachers who have been to a competition and/or watched online almost all have said they understand the flow of the game more than in any previous year except 2012. What I see is a game that cannot be dominated by a good robot. I think this is a good thing. This is a game when three pretty good robots, some of which can't do everything, can legitimately be powerhouses as alliances.

That said, the penalties seem out of proportion to the final scores. But actually not by that much. Just a cursory examination of data from a few regional competitions for a few seasons (mostly Pittsburgh, Buckeye and Queen City, because those are the regional competitions we have attended and for which I have data) shows me that there have been other years where where many matches were "decided by penalties." The quotations marks are because it is probably not as simple as comparing final scores with penalty points. Because this year has been much better than years past with getting the penalty scores posted during the match there are many fewer surprise reversals after a match is done. That alone has been a serious improvement. I remember many times in the past having a match end and then waiting for all the fouls to be tallied to see who won.

As Jim and others have pointed out, there are just too many 50 point technical fouls. I think that most of the contact inside the frame perimeter technical fouls could and should be just fouls. If you design a game where the robots pretty much have to expand outside their frame perimeters to gather balls you shouldn't call technical fouls when there is non-intentional contact. As for making it never advantageous to intentionally draw a foul, you can make all fouls deemed intentional technical fouls. Take the pinning rules. You could easily say that teams that don't back off in time get a foul. If they continue the pin for more than 3 or more than 5 more seconds, or through to the end of the match, it is a technical foul in addition.

As I have said in a couple of other threads, the other thing that would improve game play is having dedicated scorekeepers and let the other refs concentrate on fouls. But to do this they would really need to start at the beginning of the season so that each scorekeeper had a pad. Ideally one scorekeeper for each team could just watch for possessions and scores by that team. But you could probably get away this year with one scorekeeper watching each alliance.

I still think that with some easy to implement changes this could be one of my two favorite games, because the game play itself is so important.