I have assembled a small committee of referees to come up with rule changes for MARC. Since this is the first off-season in Michigan, it may be setting a precident, or may not - KK, WMRI and any others that pop up can do their own thing. We’d like any of your suggestions.
A few guidelines:
The rule change will not change the fundamentals of the game
The rule change will not be any more restrictive than the current rule
The rule change must be enforceable. It cannot make a situation harder to interpret or call. It must work with the field and scoring system. (So sorry, no change to DOGMA.)
The rules to be changed are only those in Section 7, The Game. Rules in other sections of the manual will not be addressed.
I agree, this year’s game would have been much better if hanging could be a game changer. In my opionion, hanging should be worth 3-5 points. Many teams worked hard to comply with the original game challenge only to find out 2 points is not worth the 20 seconds of game time, resulting many teams abandoning the hanging part of the game.
This is probably atleast partially a self-serving post, but I don’t really like the rule changes that change the importance or weight of certain objectives. Teams spent a ton of time brainstorming and building their robot based on the point values in the game manual. I think giving extra points for hanging or autonomous goals changing the game too much from what the robots were built to play. As much I would like to see autonomous goals from the far zone worth 2 points, I don’t think that would be fair.
That being said, I would like a change to the ranking system. Instead of the loser getting the winner’s score, they could get 2 times their score. The winner would still get their score, twice the losers score and 5 points while the loser would get two times their score. This would eliminate the 6v0 strategy and would reward those teams that lose 13-12 instead of 13-0.
I don’t know if you think this is considered working with the field and scoring system, but 2 ideas from the MARC thread:
1 different point value soccer ball (so when scored, the team will get X number of points instead of one.
Make autonomous balls scored count for more points.
I’m not sure how MARC is going to be run, but if there is a person counting each goal, then the final score will be accurate, so that would reduce the automatic counting problem.
One thing that I did not like was that if a team received a red card during eliminations, the entire alliance was disqualified for that match.
I’m sorry that I cannot suggest a better alternative, but that rule didn’t seem fair. Maybe if a robot gets a red card, then it has to sit out the next match and allow an alternate to play?
Well, my post was probably more self-serving than yours, but I think there’s a good point to be made that most teams believed less points would be scored than were, and such that hanging would be more important (less people would try to hang knowing how much hanging would be worth relatively to other parts of the game). Also, considering the difficulty of suspension, the 1-point bonus granted was negligible, so I thought that should be taken into consideration in these rule changes.
Adding points to either of these things would perhaps even the balance of how many teams hang, though one could say that those who predicted accurately should have an advantage. More suspension points would be nice though.
If you were to post “official” rules relatively soon, some teams may be able to adjust their strategies accordingly. I know that we have a working hanger just sitting in our shop, for example. The reason we didn’t use it was because it made us unable to cross the bump due to our elevated CG. We could switch to a 1-zone robot if we put it on, but since hanging is only 2 points, we didn’t think it worth it.
I disagree. After having been on the side that got intentionally run into while trying to hang in two different matches and watching our hanging arm get bashed violent against the tower (luckily not breaking it), I’d stick with the current rule.
I would agree that:
Auton balls 2 points apiece
Hanging 4 points
Loser score = 2 * their own score
In addition:
You can expand when not touching your tower (so the refs don’t have to micro manage)
Maybe early expansion if the intent is obviously to hang? I hated when you could tell people were trying to hang before the last 20 secs and they would get bumped off the tower for a sec while trying to line up, get a penalty and negate their effort. Also it would encourage more hanging. I havn’t cross referanced the team list or anything, but I remember a ton of robot who took a long time to line up, would get it, and the buzzer would sound before they could lift. Many will chalk it up to design flaws, but it is the off season lets shoot for the most fun and not so many pesky rules.
Also I vote that ther should be a rule against high speed ramming. with the bumper zones where they are, alot of robots will flip if high speed rammed. trust me… we did and our CG is like 2 inches off the ground.
I’m still advocating penalizing a team for harmful actions, but I don’t believe that the entire alliance should be penalized for a lapse of a judgement of a driver who got caught up in the heat of competition.
I’m still advocating penalizing a team for harmful actions, but I don’t believe that the entire alliance should be penalized for a lapse of a judgement of a driver who got caught up in the heat of competition.
Then what are you suggesting? Disqualification of a team? 5-point penalty?
I agree. If one of my alliance members were to damage another robot, we would have no way to stop them. We also were not responsible (during seeding rounds) for picking them. There should be a penalty during the qualifying rounds for the offending robot, though not for the other 2 alliance members. During elimination, whatever team picked the offending team, as well as the offending team should be disqualified.
I would have to agree with this. A couple of times we would go to hang early, only to get penalties because we would be an inch away from the tower. It was noticeable, but… we were not trying to completely choke the game by then expanding and blocking the whole field, or punching out an arm to knock a robot out.
Perhaps… within five inches of the tower, you can go into final configuration mode, or something. I think it’s too late for a team to design a robot to be a chokehold on the game because of that rule now, so that’s what I’ll advocate.
I don’t necessarily think that hanging should be worth any more points.
I do, however, think suspensions should be worth MUCH more! I feel like suspending should be a serious game breaker. Not to mention, I’m going to be really disappointed if I don’t see any more of these.
