I’m starting this thread to discuss rule change ideas for Chezy Champs, which Team 254 is hosting in September. The baseline rule set would be the same as used at the Championship.
To align with Chezy Champs’ philosophy, potential rule changes should:
Fix “broken” aspects of gameplay with minimally-invasive adjustments
Reduce burden on referees by eliminating inconsequential rules or establishing less equivocal criteria
Reduce team frustration
Potential rule changes should not:
Make teams wish they’d designed a different robot
Make it feel like a different game
Require non-trivial changes to the field
Here are the potential, draft changes we’ve been contemplating so far:
Eliminate the COOPERTITION BONUS. Rationale: It doesn’t really make a difference at high levels of play and can introduce noise into the rankings.
Raise the ACTIVATION BONUS threshold to 30 points. Rationale: Make it so that a DOCKED robot during AUTO along with two ENGAGED robots during TELEOP is no longer sufficient; the AUTO robot must be ENGAGED (while three ENGAGED robots during TELEOP remains sufficient on its own for the bonus).
Eliminate the cable protector. Rationale: The sensor and lights within the CHARGE STATION are not necessary for accurate scoring, and the absence of the bump could enable faster play and higher levels of scoring.
Thoughts or ideas? Particularly interested in hearing from referees about rules they wish they could have called differently.
Also welcome are suggestions to improve the scoring overlay in Cheesy Arena; I am already planning to put a full representation of the GRID in place of the difficult-to-decipher LED strings.
explicitly allow replays based on video evidence of field failures, charge pads falling apart had an impact on alliances at fields all over the place this year
Remove the penalty for bot to bot contact when both are inside of their zones
Allow multiple robots to balance in auto, and update the rules for the hybrid node scoring to be more forgiving (i.e. the wedged cubes from Orbit would have counted, or pieces partially in one node would score in that node rather than only if it was fully contained).
Change supercharged nodes to just double the value of the node they are in as opposed to a flat 3 points
OR
Allow for super charged nodes to also make links when 3 of them are in a row (worth 5 points like normal)
My logic is I think strategically choosing a scoring location on the grid was very cool early on before everyone could just fill the grid or get close to it. With supercharged nodes it just felt like teams were placing them in the quickest location. Either of these ideas return that strategy as you now are either rewarded for continuing to score high for more points or cycle multiple low for less per cycle but potentially more points overall if we make super charge nodes double their original value . While the other idea you are rewarded for strategically filling the super charged pieces to try to get links.
I actually like the challenge the cable protector creates. Some teams prioritized being able to drive over it easily, others didn’t. On a reasonably wide open field, this obstacle is kind of interesting.
Eliminate HP cube and cone throwing. It makes there an added challenge for traffic management separating more coordinated teams and you get more cool crashes when team misjudge the distance in the loading zone.
In auto allow three robots to try and balance to add a interesting factor having three robots balancing gives you each 12 points in auto and an additional 20 if you can get all three to balance make it worth it to try and balance 3 robots in auto.
Keep in mind they run their own FMS (Cheesy Arena) so not having the cables eliminates having to run hardwired I/O to the stations. Regular FMS wouldn’t handle this so well. But since they’re rolling their own, they can do whatever they want!
Personally, I think the game would have been much more interesting with loading zones a la Escanaba.
I did some back-of-the-napkin math around kickoff and concluded that with the right extesions and brakes, a robot could roadblock the loading zone without the panhandles, so this might be getting into “wish they’d built a different bot” territory. But I think we can also agree that roadblocks aren’t the sort of gameplay we wanted to see anyway.
And Fletcher is definitely well aware of that. I think Fletcher is less so saying that Cheesy Arena couldn’t handle the scoring, but more that the visual feedback is important for humans involved – both teams and volunteer referees. 254 could build in a different visual indicator, but without one, I think Fletcher raises an interesting point.
Consider making auto bonus scoring worth more than 1 point if scoring high or mid
A little more drastic: increase the number of completed links to 6 (like champs) with no coopertition drop, but count vertical links that were not already used to form a horizontal link
I haven’t given this much thought, but eliminating G303 (don’t touch opponent game piece in auto) and maybe G302 (don’t cross auto line) could allow for some cool autos. I really enjoyed autos in 2022 and 2020 that stole game pieces from opposing protected zones, since it raises the auto point ceiling so much while also being very high risk.
There should still be a tech foul for contacting an opposing robot on their side of the field during auto of course.
