Well sparked by the B.E. thread, what do you consider to be fair defense. Pushing, ramming, spearing, blocking, pinning, etc. What do you do and what do you think should be allowed in a match. Then what do you think a team should be Dq’D for.
wow Corey what a good question. i have learned from the off season that ramming and other actions are allowed. but it all depends on the robot and the drivers. like for me i thought that 25 pushed the limits sometimes but on the other hand you might thing just right amount of pushing. but i feel it is different from robot to robot.
My personally opinion on defense is if you purposely destroy an opposing bot then you should be DQ’d. Other wise I think defense is okay. Remember everything has its opposite: good and evil, positive and negative, vanilla and chocolate. So why shouldn’t a game with lots of offensive strategies have its share of defensive ones.
I think that any defense should be allowed as long as the robot remains functional for the next match. I will admit that i overturned 8 robots in the last season, so that they couldn’t compete in the rest of that match. I never received a penalty for it, and I think it should stay that way. It was all in friendly competition. In my opinion, if you don’t want to be flipped, don’t make a top-heavy robot.
I have been known to flip robots as well, probably 10 or more, all by accident. It really depends on the circumstances if you ask me. If you intentionally go out there looking to flip a robot, not many would agree with that. If it just happens that they get in the way, and the only way to avoid it is pushing, and they do flip over, well thats a different story.
I see no problem with designing your robot with the intention to flip others. Gently, and with no permanent damage of course.
defensive play was really controvertial this year, our team mainly aimed for defensive play and we did not earn any major penalties or DqS while playing denfese, and it was very effective in all the rounds we played defense.
I feel that the game was really severe in penalties this year to try and keep the game to offense, the Q and A segment in update 18 is an example that the game was aimed to be played offensively, however defense proved to be effective and a lot of teams went with it. We were victims of defensive play when we ended up getting stuck due to people pushing us around (when we were seed #1 :ahh: ) in Trenton. I belive defense is ok as long as it doesnt interrupt with what the gamemakers intended the gameplay to be like.