Discussion: Release Team Field Drawings Early

[Justin Montois]

I have been thinking more about ways to increase the low to mid level teams competitiveness in the FRC. Eliminating Bag Day, District Events ETC, I believe have this goal in mind as well.

Another thing we may want to consider is releasing Some/All of the team specific drawings a week before kickoff. I believe this would, among other things;

1: Give teams more time during build season to focus on building robots. The 2016 game alone required weeks for some teams to build field elements.

2. Improve the quality of the Prototyping and eventually robots as early designs will have a better chance of success with quality field elements that weren't built during the initial build season rush.

3. Eliminate the built in advantage of some teams, mine included, that are involved in hosting kickoffs and have access to pre-built field elements immediately after kickoff.

4. The FRC community can collaborate on best practices to build elements. Issues like the 2013 team drawing Pyramid could be avoided with crowd sourced solutions before the six week build season is impacted.

I think the argument that the secrecy of the game must be maintained is a bit of an antiquated notion. I believe that most teams will wait until the actual game rules are released before spending time and money guessing at the game. And honestly, so what if they do. I think any potential benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

I am very interested in the opinion of others. Thoughts?