It’s no secret. Bill Miller even admitted that the Kinect would be huge next year. I was laughing at all the references Dave made about the Kinect when speaking, since he acted like we didn’t know it.
I really like the 2005 game piece. It was a fun challenge to figure out the simplest way to hold it. I hope next year’s game piece is something we have not seen before or at the very least something we have not seen in a long time.
I think a simple PVC pipe will present a difficult challenge especially if there is a lot of pipes to score.
I like this year’s cooperation bonus compared to previous attempts. I felt its value was too high. If next year has it again, it should be weighted less than a win. Also, I think it needs to be possible for one robot to achieve it. It could be difficult for one robot to achieve compared to having two robots going for (like filling up a goal with a certain # of game pieces, two robots would be quicker). I don’t want a good robot to be punished in the rankings by playing against a weak alliance that can’t cooperate.
Wouldn’t one robot cooperating be similar to the sound of one hand clapping? A Zen game! 
Depending on how the PVC pipes are dispensed, teams who also did FTC in 2010 could have an advantage, just being able to make essentially an oversized version of their FTC scoring mechanism.
It could be done by awarding bonus seeding points to one alliance if they score a certain amount of points on their own goal. This would also add the strategic element of deciding whether or not to risk their victory by scoring points for the other alliance. It would be very interesting to see that play out.
Before or after the pipes are filled with varying amounts of water and capped? ducks
If it was up to me I’d like to see a game piece like 2008. Its something that teams have seen before but on a scale that makes everything teams know about handling that type of object have to be reexamined.
As for an end game I’m a big fan of robots having to be elevated in some way. My favorite is 2007 where one robot has to elevate the others. 2004 and 2010 are fun to because it makes for a great spectator event when the end game involves robots trying to get up high in some way.
I’d like to see a co-op with the 2007 style end game as well. Co-op points based on one team elevating the other alliances robots above x height. More points for multiple robots. Get to see teams decide how many robots they think they could raise in 1 go. Plus imagine a blue robot raises 2 red robots, while the remaining red robot raises the two other blue for a full co-op.
I, for one, approve of tetras returning.
Tetras would be cool, but put a twist. Get a different random shape. Something like a hexagonal prism that’s been hollowed out.
It’s by no means a “hint” but in the videos of the Q&A session at champs, Bill Miller mentioned that they are possibly scrapping their plan for 2013 due to seeing this year’s game live. I think he meant that after seeing this year’s game, they for some reason changed their mind about what they had planned. On that note, he repeatedly said they were very pleased with how cooperation worked out and that it was very hard to seed well if you didn’t cooperate. So, I would expect co-op to be as value as it was this year again.
I also recall him very strongly emphasizing using the kinect in the offseason and that while this year the field did not support on-robot kinects, that may not be the case in future. Therefore, I see on-robot capabilities being a bonus next year or in 2014.
Just my thoughts…::rtm::
-Anna
I predict stacking and/or very small game objects (similar to the FTC balls this year). Last year’s FTC game involved bridges, and so did this year’s FRC game. I think this will happen again. There are also the Tetras.
Yeah I guess it would. I am searching for the robot equivalent of having to get a dresser up a flight of stairs. I once had to do it by myself. It was the longest hour of my life as moved the giant dresser one step at a time. It was so big, I could not grab it properly. It was not that heavy cause I took everything out but if I had a second person helping me, it would have been a 3 minute task.
So I am thinking of a robot task similar in theme where one robot could do it by itself but it will be very difficult. The crowd reaction could be, “that robot is going to actually try it by itself?” Maybe a dead lift of an elongated version of the 2002 goals? So one robots CG would be far away from the goal’s CG.
That is another idea, if an alliances have a minimum score, the opposite team gets cooperation points.
It would encourage us as a community to help every robot to play the game. However, i think its a sad scenario if your alliance can’t score and you need your opponents to score for you. Its kinda like the AYSO soccer mercy rules. I would feel even more bummed out if it happened to be. Ideally it would be that alliances won’t play defense until the minimum scores are achieved.
I think it could have something that has to do with this years FTC game. Last years FTC had balancing, and this year had balancing.
I think they will have another game similar to this one.
easy to understand scoring/ interesting to general public.
so not tetras
2005 was won by scoring more tetras and playing tic tac toe. I think that is pretty simple, I never had a student who struggled to grasp what 2005 game was after watching it. All you need to say, tetras are 3 points, controlling a row was 10 points. Simple
I don’t know what the nature of the game will be, but I think this graphic is particularly telling. It seems that 2012 was pretty universally acclaimed as a pretty enjoyable game, and @FRCFMS gave us data on how teams were scoring points. In Rebound Rumble, there was a pretty even distribution between the three parts of the game, teams scored about as many points in autonomous as they did in teleop, as they did in the endgame. There are obviously outliers, but in general it was pretty close. This would provide a good scoring roadmap as FIRST moves forward.
Now I’m kind of curious to see what this distribution looked like at the CMP though. There’s something to be said for how the typical field plays the game versus the top tier, and the championship field was significantly outscoring the week 2 field.
Aim High II.
With a high goal that doesn’t jam and real time scoring.
Sounds quite a bit like rebound rumble. Plus, I doubt that they would do similar shooting games two years in a row.
Personally, I like the idea of tetras, batons, traffic cones, footballs, plastic bins… or other oddly shaped and unique game pieces. I even liked the inner tubes for logomotion and rack and roll, but by now inner tubes and balls seem like problems we’ve already solved. We know how to manipulate those game pieces and score them. So it’s my hope that the GDC comes up with an interesting game piece for next year’s game.
I was thinking instead of having 1 standard game piece we could have 3 different ones… they could be completely different or even just different sizes. So we’d have to build a device that could handle the 3 different game pieces, or 3 different devices… or we’d have to plan on manipulating only 1 or 2 of the game pieces… and the game pieces could all have different point values. I think it would be really interesting and challenging from both a design and strategic standpoint, making for interesting and different machines as well as gameplay.
Something capture-the-flaggy would be cool.
My idea isn’t quite “if the opposing alliance has a certain amount of points, you get coopertition points”, because in that case, if you were playing against a strong alliance you could just let them reach that score by themselves. I was thinking that one alliance would NEED to contribute a certain amount to their opponents’ score to earn the bonus.
I do like the idea of a capture-the-flag style game, it would need an interesting field design though. A completely flat 27’x54’ field without any sort of “base” that the flag is in would be somewhat awkward to defend.