Best FRC Games

[Kyle A]

Originally Posted by Tim Delles

This discussion has come up before, and it really needs to be separated out between 3v3 and pre-3v3.

Also, how many people on the forums now actually experienced some of the older games, personally I know the games going back to 2000, but how many of the forum users now can go back to pre-3v3 games?

3v3 didn't start until 2005 with Triple play. my 1st 2 years 2003 stack attack and 2004 FIRST Frenzy Raising the bar were 2v2. The first game I ever saw played was 2000 and I was a FLL student then.

Out of All the Games that I have been involved in 2003-now I have to say my favorite was 2006 Aim High. We did not have the best robot, and even rebuilt the robot at our first event, but I had the most fun watching that game. All the poof balls everywhere, the wide open field, the matches that you could go from winning to tied in a matter of seconds, and the race to the ramp at the end. That is also the robot that we still use for most demonstrations, the kids love throwing the balls into the hopper and watching the balls fly back out onto the ground from the rollers.

[Lil' Lavery]

Breakaway was a lot of fun to watch at Championship or at events with multiple elite teams. But a vast majority of the time, it was painfully boring and had more 0-0 ties than just about any game I can remember (and I remember 2007). It was painfully boring in qualification matches and even during the eliminations at many regionals. While every game improves dramatically when the level of competition is increased, that curve was way too steep in Breakaway.

Originally Posted by Tim Delles

This discussion has come up before, and it really needs to be separated out between 3v3 and pre-3v3.

Also, how many people on the forums now actually experienced some of the older games, personally I know the games going back to 2000, but how many of the forum users now can go back to pre-3v3 games?

Add a further break for the pre-alliance era (1998 and before) as well. Possibly even another split for the much smaller scale robots of 1992 and 1993.

[Jared Russell]

Looks like people really enjoy shooting balls.

[apalrd]

Breakaway was fun to play at the highest level.

That said, if you could score 3 balls in autonomous and hang, you would almost guarantee a win in a rather high percentage of all matches. Without doing anything at all except hanging for the entire teleop period.

That is because the average OPR was just above 1, meaning the average match score was around 3.

The game was hard. 'Carrying' a ball was hard. Very hard. There was a lot of tweaking and a lot of minor improvement in even the best robots through the entire season, and there was a lot of slight variety in the ball control mechanisms.



I can't make a good comparison about the past games, but most of the post-2000 games sound really fun to play.

[Tyler_Kaplan]

I'm surprised Lunacy is ranked so low , it's one of my favorites, along with breakaway

[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by CalTran

Alas, if only figuring out what makes or breaks a game were that simple. Particularly in the method that FIRST presents the games, it's hard to think outside the normal configuration when Breakaway was described best as robot soccer or Rebound Rumble as robot basketball. The description really drives the design, as many teams forget that Breakaway was not soccer reliant, but simply a name of the game where the goal was transport a ball to a hole in the wall.

It's not that hard to come up with the game breaking strategies. You just need some experience at approaching the game from the right perspective.

In 2006 you could win by not playing the game. If you kept the score low all that matttered was the ramp points, and pinning on the ramp was legal. Playing using these factors allowed a robot purely playing defense to control the game over scorers. Most teams didn't play this way or pick up on it but this was a way to break the game.

In 2007 the secret was to again not play the game. Don't go for long multiplier chains but instead break up the rack so the other team couldn't get the multipliers. Before they realize they're wasting time trying to get long chains they can't actually get the time ran out while you got 50 points for lifting 2 robots.

That said the GDC has been exceptionally good at blocking game breaking strategies in the the game/robot rules since 2008. That year 190 tried a game breaking strategy that many of us had come up with and discounted as illegal because as soon as they broke the plane into the previous zone it was a penalty.

Even in 2010 when the 469 robot became legal in week 2 due to a rule change it had originally been against the rules so most teams that came up with the design had already discounted it as illegal before the change giving 469 a jump on everyone else.

[Wetzel]

Stack Attack is my clear favourite as worst game. The rest are more difficult to rank.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by apalrd

Breakaway was fun to play at the highest level.

That said, if you could score 3 balls in autonomous and hang, you would almost guarantee a win in a rather high percentage of all matches. Without doing anything at all except hanging for the entire teleop period.

That is because the average OPR was just above 1, meaning the average match score was around 3.

Mean score based on OPR is probably not the best way to evaluate that. While the mean score may be 3, I'd be willing to bet the median score was underneath 3. If you score higher than the median, you're winning more than half of the matches on average.

Originally Posted by Peter Matteson

It's not that hard to come up with the game breaking strategies. You just need some experience at approaching the game from the right perspective.

In 2006 you could win by not playing the game. If you kept the score low all that matttered was the ramp points, and pinning on the ramp was legal. Playing using these factors allowed a robot purely playing defense to control the game over scorers. Most teams didn't play this way or pick up on it but this was a way to break the game.

In 2007 the secret was to again not play the game. Don't go for long multiplier chains but instead break up the rack so the other team couldn't get the multipliers. Before they realize they're wasting time trying to get long chains they can't actually get the time ran out while you got 50 points for lifting 2 robots.

Those are much less "game breaking" than other game breaking strategies, and aren't even close to choke hold strategies. Not that either of those strategies couldn't succeed, but they were far from guaranteed wins (or even necessarily the most successful strategy).

If you could successfully force your opponent onto your ramp in 2006 (or they went there voluntarily), that strategy was legitimate. But if they avoided your ramp, they could easily get back to their own to counteract your ramp points. Not to mention if they outscore you in autonomous you're left with a relatively large hole to climb out of (equivalent to 2 robots on the ramp or 40% of 3 robots on the ramp).

In 2007, nothing about preventing/breaking up opponents rows stopped them from also getting their ramp points. And if the ramp points were equal, it came down to who had more on the rack. If both alliances placed 6 tubes, and your alliance placed them perfectly across the rack (to minimize potential rows) while the other alliance build two rows of 3 above one another, they win the rack by a 28-16 margin. It was a rare situation when teams denied themselves the opportunity for ramp points willingly (111 being the obvious example of a team that usually kept scoring rather than going for the end game points). And most alliances were willing to battle intensely for the key positions on the rack, and often would set defenders to stop teams from cutting off their rows.

[Ian Curtis]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Mean score based on OPR is probably not the best way to evaluate that. While the mean score may be 3, I'd be willing to bet the median score was underneath 3. If you score higher than the median, you're winning more than half of the matches on average.

On an alliance level the skew isn't particularly awful. On a robot level I'm sure it is much more pronounced since you miss out on the averaging across 3 robots.

(Across qualifying matches in the FRCFMS twitter feed in 2010, the mean match score was 4.2, the median was 4)

On a related note, I've always been surprised looking at historical data at how large the gap is between winning and losing alliances. I wonder if game "goodness" can be correlated to the size of that gap...

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by Peter Matteson

It's not that hard to come up with the game breaking strategies. You just need some experience at approaching the game from the right perspective.

-snip-

I suppose this kind of comes down to your definition of "game breaking." I've always considered "game breaking" to imply that, if a given team can do something, there's nothing the others can do to stop them from winning. An example of that sort of "game breaking" would be 71's Flopbot in 2002, or just in general that game, where you won defacto if you controlled all three goals. By that definition, I wouldn't classify 469 as "game breaking" because there was something the opposing alliance could do, it just required them to spend almost all their efforts to thwart that particular robot.

It's more just the distinction between "excellent design/strategy" and "game breaking." "Game breaking" implies just that-- that it breaks the game. If you play good defense, there's still something the other team can do-- play better offense. A "game breaker" totally controls the game. While some of these strategies could potentially work on a qualification or practice match, I sincerely doubt that they would be equally successful in eliminations or at the Championships, which, in terms of matches, are where they actually matter.

In short, I agree that it isn't incredibly difficult to come up with a good strategy, or a good robot design if you approach the game from the right angle, but a truly game breaking design is incredibly difficult to pull off-- which is why they're called "game breakers."

My 3.14159 cents.

[nuggetsyl]

I love the 2006 game. I think we should do a replay of that game just one change. Use footballs.

[TheMadCADer]

Originally Posted by CalTran

Alas, if only figuring out what makes or breaks a game were that simple. Particularly in the method that FIRST presents the games, it's hard to think outside the normal configuration when Breakaway was described best as robot soccer or Rebound Rumble as robot basketball. The description really drives the design, as many teams forget that Breakaway was not soccer reliant, but simply a name of the game where the goal was transport a ball to a hole in the wall.

Personally, I'm a Breakaway fan (With heavy bias as it was my rookie season.) Everything that year, from being the third pick of the second alliance at Greater Kansas City with 16 and 1625, to rising to the #1 Seed and first alliance captains in Oklahoma City, to striding across the floor of the Georgia Dome, was amazing. The robots, IMHO, were totally different that year too. As stated, it takes an eye that sees past the exterior generic box shape and sees what's within the box that truly amazed me.

Coincidentally it was my rookie year as well. I couldn't stand watching matches, mostly because of the frustration of having to see a bunch of teams in qualifications try to simply push the balls into the goals and continuously have it bounce out or roll back down. Unless there was a team (or, if you got lucky, teams) with a good shooter on the field it was simply a robotic interpretation of Sisyphus and the boulder.

I will concede that there most certainly were a bunch of different ways that teams built their robots, though I found them to not make as much difference as in other years. Most other games tended to have a couple of different 'positions' to play, each requiring a distinctly styled robot. In 2009 'shooters' and 'dumpers' played the game very differently and couldn't be interchanged. In 2008 you had tiny but fast lap-bots weaving in between hurdlers like 16 and 1114 that would shoot trackballs across the field. Heck, in 2007 each team chose between any of three 'classes' with different height and weight limits. But in 2010, any rear or middle zone shooting robot could play ball-pusher in the front zone, and any good ball pusher still had a good ball-grabber and decent kicker, so they could move back as well (though obviously each robot and driver had a position they liked best).

I guess my point would be that there wasn't much in the game that necessitated making distinct design 'direction' choices and strategizing around the trade-offs associated with them.

[StevenB]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

Not surprising, but a heavy bias in the rankings towards recent games.

All the young'uns don't know what they missed. A more accurate model might ask folks which years they watched/played and then normalize the results based on the number of "eligible voters".