What other big game changes or rp adjustments have been made prior to worlds in past seasons?

[Reese_Otto1746]

Trying to generate a timeline of changes through the past decade or so.

[Kpchem]

The only such change I can remember is in 2016. In Stronghold, one of the RP objectives was to CAPTURE the TOWER. The action of CAPTURING consisted of two items

1. The TOWER needed to be WEAKENED, which is to say the STRENGTH be lowered to at or below 0
2. The TOWER needed to be surrounded at the end of the match by three robots that are SCALED or CHALLENGED.

TOWER’s started off the year with a STRENGTH of 8, and that number was raised to 10 later in the season. However, I will also note that the blue box below was in the manual that year

As the season progresses, TOWERS may become fortified to increase
their starting STRENGTH. While the starting STRENGTH of a TOWER
will not change between weeks of Regional or District Competition
play, the starting STRENGTH of a TOWER may be changed for District
Championship and/or FIRST Championship play. Teams will be notified
of changes in the starting STRENGTH of a TOWER no later than the
scheduled Team Update prior to the date of the event.

The full manual is available here if anyone wanted to reference it.

A similar clause existed in the 2020 FRC Game Manual in Section 4.4.2, but was not used as the season never got that far.

[AndrewFRC135]

In 2010, they had to change how seeding points were earned in early March because the system was broken, to say the least. Not sure if that counts: https://www.firstinspires.org/sites/default/files/uploads/resource_library/frc/game-and-season-info/archive/2010/2010-breakaway-team-updates.pdf

[Kpchem]

That’s a good shoutout that I’d forgotten. After Week 1 there was a 5-point bonus to the winning alliance that didn’t exist before, to try and disincentivize 6v0 matches (which mostly worked).

[AndrewFRC135]

I had to go back and check, but there were clauses in 2012, 2013, & 2014 at kickoff that FIRST could change the point values of the endgame within a pre-defined range at the first championship, but elected not to. There’s probably more years they did this I’m not remembering.

[Hallry]

@AndrewFRC135

I had to go back and check, but there were clauses in 2012, 2013 , & 2014 at kickoff that FIRST could change the point values of the endgame within a pre-defined range at the first championship, but elected not to. There’s probably more years they did this I’m not remembering.

As others have mentioned elsewhere today, FIRST also had clauses in the 2017 Game Manual allowing them to change the number of pre-populated GEARS (Section 3.4.2) and the FUEL threshold pressure (Section 4.3) for the 2017 FRC World Championship. However, they did not act upon either of these.

[Hallry]

@Reese_Otto1746

What other big game changes?

Personally I think that a big change that is often overlooked is the rule revision made following the official Week 0 Event in 2013. Originally, human players were to be able to throw any DISC over the FEEDER STATION in the last 30 seconds of the match. However, at the Week 0 Event FIRST HQ quickly identified safety issues associated with this, and instead restricted it such that human players could only throw the 6 red/blue discs to be scored on the top of the PYRAMID. I often think how much differently the game would have played out had human players been allowed to throw any of the 118 white DISCS during the end of those matches…