What a dumb match. It relied on the pegs being broken to work, so essentially relying on field faults. There was no way to score a gear because the field was broken.
Event 1 - Not Picked
Event 2 - SF
Event 3 - QF
Event 4 - QF
No offense, but your success rate if you attempted this strategy seems to speak for itself.
We considered this. I’m not sure if it was kickoff day or Sunday that we determined that defense of the scale should be done at least a robot length away from the opposing null zone to avoid tech fouls, and that we should do 99% of our transits from one side of the field to the other through our own null zone.
OBTW, what were they thinking when they named it the null zone?
How many wins you got?
The point is I’d really enjoy the free points we would get from someone trying this strange idea, and from a statistical observation it doesn’t really seem to work.
Looks like they have 2…
It didn’t rely on a field fault. They would have executed that strategy with or without the peg being damaged (and it’s safe to say that the drivers and coaches have no clue the status of the pegs on the far side of the opposing airship). The strategy was aimed at denying the other alliance any reasonable chance at getting 4 gears (and the associated 100 point bonus) and then getting enough of a kPa lead for kPa to matter. It wasn’t about complete denial of rotor points, but throwing the opponent off their game and slowing their cycle times by forcing them to share a peg.
Thanks for answering my question, but I really didn’t intend for a literal response. I was simply making this joke since it seemed your post was along the same vein as the sticker’s inspiration.
I don’t actually care how many wins you’ve got. 
We purposefully did not use this strategy at events before states. The only point at which we decided that the match actually warranted it and we needed it badly was https://youtu.be/yr_3m3J63Hg (around the one minute mark). We didn’t try it for long, as we didn’t explain it to our alliance member, who told us to pull out. There was no reason to argue then and there, but we were successful. I think that other teams most definitely could utilize this strategy to great effectiveness with a little cooperation from alliance partners. If you have a switchbot, they can work on defending against anybody who tries to flank you from the other side of the scale. Even better is if you have someone using the platform zone cubes to scale, as that will create another deterrent for people to come onto your side of the field. We did try to apply this strategy in our last match of the competition, but our driver station computer was acting up.
Even with the broken peg, red won. Blue would have been sacrificing two gear scoring robots in exchange for allowing only a single scorable peg on red.
However, then it becomes a 1v3. Unless blue can effectively use all three pegs with a single robot (hint: they can’t) then all they’re doing is opening themselves up to double-red defense and letting the third red robot score as much as they want. Basically, all red has to do is have their best robot working on gears and use the other 2 for defense. All blue can do at this point is try to match that good red robot, but now up against 2 robots of defense. The winning margin for red was due solely to the broken peg; had the peg been functional they would have won by a landslide.
I would caution teams from using this strategy… While technically allowed by the rule books I think the risk is far greater than reward. I would hope my opponents employed this strategy and would just push them out of the way for easy tech foul points. Instead a good driver and a drive train can take an opponent out. This past weekend we were tied in the semifinals 1-1 and things were looking bad. We broke our intake and had already burned our timeout. We didn’t even have time to charge our pneumatics before the match as we tried to remove the broken parts from our robot. We made the call to remove our intake and take out one of the other alliances scale bots to put our partner scale bot (399) against the opponents remaining scale bot. Just goes to show you never know what can happen in a match.
We made a mistake and are taking the precautionary measures for it to not happen again. It is never our intention to disable another robot.
No offense but it wasn’t posted because we are bragging about how awesome we are. It was posted because one of my students wanted to share the idea and see what the community had to say. I told him somebody like you was going to post something like that yesterday before he posted it and worked with him on his wording to try and avoid provoking it… Gotta say, didn’t expect it to be you.
Our season has been phenomenal given the crazy stuff we’ve tried this year. The Zebracorns take risks and sometimes that ends in success and sometimes not. This year it hasn’t netted us a Winner banner but it’s given us a lot of other cool hardware and a Chairman’s banner… which last I checked the script was the highest award given at an event.
The strategy is risky and it’s highly situationally dependent as has been highlighted. It wasn’t run in many matches at all for us.
As for how many wins we got… a lot more than you highlighted with some quick TBA stats.
One way this strategy could work is if the defense robot had mecanums (wait, defensive robot with mecanums?) to create space in the center of the robot for a mechanism that would actuate a giant tread plate toward the ground once completely in the null zone. I’m thinking something like a 20" by 25" plate of this stuff http://www.andymark.com/product-p/am-3309.htm
This robot would have to be very short (low COG) and weigh in at 119.9 pounds (higher force from friction).
Note, this design would likely have to be too short to go on the platform, so its only chance for offense beyond auto is a tape measure climber that would extend out far enough to not require the robot to be on the platform.
(This was a design I came up with the night after kickoff and immediately decided against because who wants a robot that can’t score*)
*Or does this robot score by using defense…
358 abused the wording of the rules on our alliance quite a bit during our Week 1 finals run at Central New York. And it worked - to a point.
I think this kind of situational around-the-null-zone defense has to be surprising, and it can’t be something sustained throughout a match.
But slowing down your opponents for just a few moments on some cycles early in the match can be enough to take the scale for the rest of the match
This strategy has been a significant point of frustration for me this year. Teams have employed it against us, we’ve pushed into the null territory, and then refs haven’t always called tech fouls. So, it seems to be quite valid and safe assuming a ref doesn’t understand the rules! /venting my spleen
The extremely easy counter to this strategy is to have an alliance partner hit the defending robot from inside the null territory.
I saw this being done this weekend…in person…and thought it was a brilliant situational strategy. I don’t see it as something that could be used for a whole match, or even every match. BUT, it’s a “fake punt” if you will. And, could be very useful to have in a drive team’s bag of tricks if you’re trying to keep the scale going into the climb time.
Personally, I appreciate the info 900 shares with the community, so just ignore the haters. The insight you have provided other teams means you share in their wins as well, so the win column is exponential (like that’s the only reason you do what you do).
I would like to add that we had a match where the ref confused the situation giving the other alliance a penalty when they were in our null zone and we were not. They awarded us points we shouldn’t have gotten…then after displaying a “final” score, they CHANGED the final score outcome moving us from a win to a loss in the confusion.
I LOVE this idea. You’d have the maneuverability necessary to get out when you need to, but you could also really root yourself to bog down the opponents.
Thanks, maybe someone can turn their robot into this at champs (something like what y’all and 1114 did in 2015 with the harpoons)
Team 2823 played this strategy at times at Great Northern and in QF match 2 at least at MFR. In QF 2, they were disabled and began taking penalties in the null zone.
Personally I’m not enthused by it, as it requires a strong drivetrain, good driver, and very good situational awareness for what is likely less effective defense than traditional. Sure, you have the ability to shut down a scale plate, but only as long as their robots are stuck on their side of the field and you’re not getting pushed into the null zone. Playing focused defense on a single robot as 294 did as noted earlier in the thread has a proven track record and much less potential for penalties.