Flags...what will happen with them?

[Nitroxextreme]

As I am sure many people have seen over this initial weekend, the alliance flags seem to be more of an annoyance than anything else.

The flags seemed to be the only parts of robots that were constantly being "capped" making it almost impossible for the team to score during the rest of the match without violating the single tube possession rule. There was even one occurance of two tubes being placed over the flag(all by accident..usually by the human player).

Also the flags barely (if ever) stayed on the robots. I saw so many flags thrown around the field without any care as to if it fell off of the robot or not.

I understand that the flag is NOT considered part of the robot...but that point doesnt matter with the definition of a robot in control of a ringer. I believe that FIRST needs to address this issue or teams will try anything they feel is within the rules to "avoid" this catastrophe.

This problem lead some teams to avoid it by taking a very loose interpretation of rule

R15: the FLAG is approximately vertical and the top of the FLAG is a minimum of 18 inches higher than any point on the central mass or
structure of the ROBOT

I saw a few instances were the flag simple "hid" behind an arm and only stuck above it an inch or two. These robots had little or no problems...while others who had a strict interpretation of the rules got hammered.

I feel that this causes a great decrease in game play when a team has to "shake" until a ringer hopefully falls off of their flag.

I am personally looking at update 16 to make at least some mention of this problem.