Opinions: The importance of elevation/suspension

[kirtar]

At the Buckeye Regional this weekend, it seemed that many of the teams believed that hanging was fairly unimportant, and thus were told not to hang on multiple occasions (in most cases, we did anyways). It is my opinion that hanging is an entirely situational decision as are many tactical decisions on the field.

As an example, if you are playing in the near zone and there are zero balls in said zone at the last 20 seconds, it may or may not be worth it to go ahead and elevate to get those two points.

In another case, the middle zone has mostly been a dead zone in most of the matches I watched. As such, there doesn't seem to be much of a loss (and pretty good gains) if the middle bot elevates, even if it takes 20 seconds to do so. Most alliances that I saw could not consistently take two balls from the middle and score them within 20 seconds even if there was no robot in the center.

On the flip side, if you are in the near zone, and somehow all twelve balls are there, you should probably just score them. Also, if you are defending and there are many balls there, it would be wise to stay.

I will admit that this is a somewhat selfish post because my team's robot does hang. However, it seemed as if the teams thought of us as just a hanging robot, when in reality we did so much more than that. While I would not pick a robot solely based on its ability to hang, I believe that said ability in combination with a respectable ability to perform another task is a powerful asset to most alliances.