Is the mini bot worth too many points. I remember in 03 everyone was upset with the king of the hill because first made it worth to many points and everything else in the game became invalid. What do you thin in this case?
i think the point value is dead on. its not high enough to drastically alter the outcome of a game, and its not low enough to make it not worth going for. i think its gonna be kinda what hanging was last year. just that last minute point bonus to seal the deal or to make up for those few tubes you didnt place.
As long as your alliance sends two mini bots up the tower successfully the worst outcome is you have lost 25 points relative to the other alliance. That means you have to score approximately a top row logo over one ubertube (24+6 for ubertube) more than the opposition to close that gap. I would personally put the point value of the mini bot as being borderline too high. A key difference between the minibot race and king of the hill is that it is not likely that one robot can achieve the end game and defend at the same time this year. Definitely too many points to ignore as a robot function.
I disagree.
To make up for a 30 point deficit, you need two top row logos.
To make up for a 50 point deficit, you need those two logos with Ubertubes under them.
If an alliance has no minibots and faces one with two minibots, they are sunk. They’re immediately 50 points below and need to score at LEAST 8 more tubes than the opponents to even think about winning.
Minibots are mandatory solely for that reason. Even if the deficit is cut to 25 points (1&2 versus 3&4) at least that’s “only” an Ubertube and top logo.
Minibots are worth FAR too many points.
That said, I think the biggest problem with them is not the point value but the race nature of it. False starts will be encouraged and there’s just no way refs can win on that one. They either penalize them for .01 second infractions, or the team that edges out the clock the most and gets away with it wins.
That said, as with all “problem parts” of the game, they become challenges for us to exploit. So yeah, build a mini bot - don’t leave home without one…
More often than not the endgame is worth too many points and then everyone complained last year’s endgame wasn’t worth enough and didn’t bother doing it.
The GDC can’t win.
Was this a common / serious complaint? The hanging bonus last year was huge and about a third to half of teams at least tried for it - and it decided the Championship. Only when matches got above 15 points did it risk being a non factor.
The points values themselves are pretty good. The problem is, like Chris is Me said, if one alliance has two minibots, and the other has none, they’ve almost guaranteed a victory.
Another big problem is that importance of certain point-resulting actions vary greatly from week 1 to Finals. As we saw last year, a good hanger was very valuable through about week 3- week 4. But by the time we reach finals, hanging is only about 8% of the totals.
It seems like the GDC is trying to base point values off of how they think the finals will play out, i.e., come finals time, the minibot value will be just right.
I’d say the point balance is pretty good… the points are high enough that you need to have one (so you can’t just ignore this portion of the game), but low enough that ignoring other portions of the game will result in a loss. This year, being able to significantly affect the score for each part of the game (auto, teleop, and finale) is crucial for a winning robot.
To me, even if you don’t have time to get a mini-bot put together, you should at least put effort into a variable deployment system. It is worth it to all teams to share their mini-bot with other teams for the coopertition bonus. So even if you have a match with an alliance with 2, and an alliance with 1, so long as the bots have a deployment system, they can go out of their way to borrow somebodies mini-bot. I personally think the bonus this year looks fairly balanced.
The coopertition bonus has no effect on your ranking or score.
But isn’t the point of FIRST not to have the greatest ranking/score, but rather to show that you won’t allow a competition to impair one’s teamworking abilities and the like?
(One facet of FIRST, not the whole thing obviously)
How many robots do you recall that hung last year to the amount that bypassed that to go score more goals?
Of the five regionals that I went to last year FLR was the only one that had double digit hanging robots and the most talked about robot from last year didn’t bother to hang at all either.
This game is more and more like the '07 game. The end game that year was worth up to 60 points if you could lift 2 robots.
After hanging tubes for 2 minutes, most teams were scoring 20 - 30 points, only to be blown away by the large bonus by the successful teams that could lift.
No quarter to false starters.
I agree with the reasoning here, but only provisionally with the conclusion. It depends on your concept of the game: is it a tube game, a minibot game, or a hybrid. I think FIRST intended a hybrid (i.e. so that there was more than one task available to teams), and was forced to make the minibots valuable to preserve that characteristic.
In the sense that they balance the aspects of the game, their value is about right. Of course, it’s a bit of an odd choice to want to balance the game between a pole-climbing toy and a significantly more interesting machine.
In the sense that minibots are just a little silly, and loaded with political baggage, they’re definitely too prominent.
if you think about it you can easily score 30 points, heres how:
put one ubertube on the top row,
make the FIRST logo on the same row,
and you get 30 points,
if you get a good relay team and a good claw you will be in the bag
I agree… they walk a very fine line with both autonomous & the end game. I think the minibot is hugely important. I also think that we will see a repeat of many previous years where teams will not work hard enough on it, and we will see many attempted races with only one (or zero) finishers.
Food for thought is that teams often misjudge how much of their effort to spend on a particular task. I went through TBA’s data, and it turned out that the average qualifying round winning alliance in week of 1 of 2010 scored about 3.8 points. An alliance of three kitbots with a rudimentary but working hanger could’ve easily won the average match last year. The GDC made it important but teams missed the bait! I think their task is made even more difficult because they need for teams to realize it is important, without making it so important that it ends up destroying the “main game.”
Everyone is assuming that Logos are easy to get. IMO Logos will almost never be seen on the field.
Saying the minibot is “worth too many points” is like saying “the drive train is worth too many points”.
Sure the minibot is worth a lot, but the drivetrain is worth a lot more. You can play the game without a minibot, but just try it without a drivetrain. 
If you keep in mind that your alliance has three teams, but only two towers, then you can see that not every robot is going to be able to deploy a minibot. So it is quite possible for a robot to make it all the way to Einstein and never deploy a minibot.
So if you don’t want to build a minibot… don’t. But I do recommend that you build a drivetrain.
After all this IS a drivetrain game.
Jason
Agreeing with duke here; the Minibot will be like hanging, worth a lot in the beginning weeks when teams aren’t as good at scoring, but by championships, teams will be much better at scoring. This might (if Duke’s right) change it from a complete game breaker to an essential part of the game that is only a modest change to final outcome.
[Rant]
In some games 3 average robots can beat 2 good robots. This is not one of those games.
I predict that nearly every compition will be won by the first seed alliance.
Why:
From a tube scoring point of view: Three robots would be a good stratigy if corrdinated properly. However, sending the weakest robot to play defense (sideways between towers) will cause enough problems that the 2 good robots can out preform the 3 average.
From a mini-bot point of view: There is only two towers. The 2 good robots will presumably have faster mini-bots then any of the 3 average robots every time. It is because of this that the 3 average robots will not be able to make a comeback with the mini-bots.
[/Rant]
Soooo, yes I do think the mini-bots would be better off as:
1st- 25 points
2nd- 20
3rd- 15
4th- 10
Possible match results:
A: 1st; 2nd +45 alliance B: 3rd; 4th +25
A: 1st; 3rd +40 B: 2nd; 4th +30
A: 1st; 4th +35 B: 2nd; 3rd +35
If alliance A gets 1st and 4th then they are now tied (plus 35 to both).
this would make the mini-bots still very relevant. However, the game would be won or lost with the tubes.