In my first pass of the manual, this year is a 180 degree flip on last year’s game with respect to penalties.
There are many, many ways to receive penalties. The winner of a match will suffer severely from penalties in qualifications because the losing alliance receives seeding points equal to the winning alliance score without the penalty points deducted. So, the winners can be losers with regarding to seeding points.
Edit: In low-scoring games, penalties could offset the coopertition bonus.
Not exactly, look at section 9.3.5 (Coopertition Bonus) - the winning alliance, in addition to getting their own score post penalties in seeding points, they also get 2x the losing alliance’s score.
What’s more important is how often the penalties are applied. What I mean by this is by if the action which would incur the penalty that is easy to do accidentally (think <G22> from Overdrive).
Looking at the manual, yes, there are more penalties. However, a number of them are easy to avoid and might get one or two violations in the season and offseason combined. Red cards are more prevalent, though.
My least favorite penalties happen to be <T14> and <T15>, myself. Those are probably going to hurt teams that aren’t paying attention.
There are ALWAYS ways for inattentive teams to get penalized for (frankly) stupid behavior. Let’s be clear for those teams who don’t want to read the manual:
Don’t remove a hanging robot unless a Ref tells you to, and