I know this is bringing up an old topic, but I had something I wanted to say…
There is a Q/A forbidding locking onto the field.
HOWEVER…
I noticed the hooks on 2W’s robot when my team encountered them in prelims. I brought this to the Engineering head ref’s attention, claiming a violation. He ruled that this was not in fact latching to the field, specifically because 2W could remove themselves any time they wanted to. I forget if this was one of my questions that was escalated to Karthik. I wanted to say this to let everyone know that it was a conscious decision by the refs to allow this feature of 2W.
Huh, you’re right … but, since you’d already scored the first to game objects (really 3 pts.) in the low goal as well as the other 15 or so pts, the stacker probably wouldn’t have made much difference
Wow! Good memory! I forgot about our good buddies from Granada Hills! The Robodox always have some excellent robots!
And I have the video! As a matter of fact, not only do I have the video, but I have (almost) the whole series!
Here’s a playlist, starting with game 1, and 599D successfully gets under the lid in game 3. It’s a really great series, so I’d recommend watching the whole thing! [Vex 2012 World Championship Division Quarterfinals 1 - YouTube
(On a side note: You may notice that SymbiOHsis moves a little slower than 569 does. This is because they actually re-constructed their drive on the morning of playoffs so that it would have more torque, in the hopes that we would pick them for playoffs and, if we were unable to pick a wallbot, they would be able to push up against wallbots long enough for us to get the doubler. This change ended up being extraneous, but it was excellent thinking on their part!)](“Vex 2012 World Championship Division Quarterfinals 1 - YouTube”)
this just goes to show that to win the game, you need “specialized” robots along with the typical “efficiancy” bots in HS (more intermediate) vex
haha, had that metagamed all the way back in December when we choose the WASABI wallbot as our first pick alliance
too bad it wasnt as consistent back then
haha yeah, we were feeling pretty confident about that match too!
good job getting past a wallbot in autonomous!
that was no easy feat
no i remember me and my teammates talking about it, and we would have won by 2-3 pts if we had the successful stack
and looking back at the vid now, i can see lots of places where we would have saved extra time…
If I remember correctly, I actually said “If a superstacker and a wallbot are together, then all pieces of Exodia have been assembled.” somewhere on the forums, but I can’t find it currently…
I can’t remember, how did do you in/ did you make it to playoffs? I feel if one of the wallbot teams had selected you, you could have been the champions.
That’s certainly not what I was thinking. When I saw that we were up against you AND murdomeek, I’m pretty sure anybody looking at me would have seen the blood drain from my face in abject terror
I remember watching a match, trying to learn how you deploy. I remember trying to learn your starting position, in what direction you deployed (from left to right or right to left), and how long it took you to do it (I actually resorted to counting the seconds out loud). After seeing you score in the 10" and manually reposition your robot, I thought “Man, we’ll have PLENTY of time to bypass them”
Then, I talked to your mentor in the stands, and he said that you could opt to bypass scoring entirely, and just expand immediately, and since I was pretty sure that you would use that option (seeing as you were allied with a wall bot)…well…
I promptly gave my cardiovascular system a good workout by sprinting back to my pits and frantically trying to find my coach/programmer. That was a lot o’ fun
And yes, do please watch the whole series. It is indeed excellent
The bolded portion is not true. I do not have special knowledge of why descoring was not permitted, but I believe it was because the GDC believed scoring would be difficult for less-experienced teams and that descoring would be easy. There are a LOT of things that go into game design that students rarely, if ever, consider, including cost, weight, size, ease of refereeing, ease of field reset, and time to score. A game has to be both a fun, interesting challenge, reasonably-priced*, AND practical to run.
I can absolutely, positively state that the GDC never designs a game to favor a certain robot design. GDC members have stated publicly (at meetings of tournament directors) that if they can see an obvious winning strategy during design they will change the rules to make that strategy less dominant.
If you think the VRC game kits are too expensive, go forth and design a game kit produced in very low volume that can be shipped UPS, that just about anyone can assemble with simple hand tools, will last a whole season, AND look professional. It’s not that easy.
Yes, in retrospect that argument does not make sense. I thought that the presence of an autonomous bonus enouraged entry-level teams to run disruptive autonomouses in order to force a programming stale-mate, but I realize now that removing an autonomous bonus really had no effect on the use of disruptive autonomous patterns. Silly me.
[INDENT][INDENT][/INDENT][/INDENT]Curse you for making sense. Now I have to qualify my statements.
[INDENT][INDENT][/INDENT][/INDENT]It would be more accurate to say that, as a result of the GDC’s decision to forbid descoring, they made a game which, unless you are at the level where where wallbots become commonplace, rewards teams who score first, score in many places, and play a purely offensive game until negation barrels are introduced. (At which point it becomes more important to impede the motion of an opponent carrying a negation barrel, creating a balance of offense and defense).
The games rules, when combined with [LIST]
*] *The Swiss-Augmented tournament style, which rewards teams who have high scoring matches, even if they lose these matches.
*] *The VEX Season, where New Zealand has their “World Cup” in the middle of the American season, thus feeding the North American teams an idea of what Championship robots will look like.
*] and the VEX Forum, which allowed the New Zealand style robot design to quickly spread across the world.
[/LIST] encouraged scoring robots, whether intentionally or not, regardless of whether they also made a game that was easy to referee and cheap to manufacture, so I stand by my statement that efficiency robots happen to be the “right” thing to build.
It was not poor game design that led to the prevalence of NZ style intake bots. The game was well designed, but was ruled by the metagame (as all good worldwide competitions with multiple winning strategies are).
Yes, this is true. As a partcipant, I would say I was completely wrapped up in the game-theory aspect of this, and didn’t consider the monetary perspective.
And this is a good thing. I would certainly say that Gateway did not intentionally favor any particular design, nor was it a “solvable” game, which is why it developed such a rich, fluid meta-game. I tip my hat to the GDC for another stand-up game. Roundup was a tough act to follow.
*This statement is only true until wallbots are introduced, which is the biggest reason why I would NEVER say Gateway favors New Zealand bots. Efficiency bots allow teams to climb the rankings more easily because of their high scoring nature, and thus are more reliable for success at local tournaments than wallbots, because a wallbot has no gurantee that the best scoring robot at a local tournament is capable of scoring every piece on it;s half of the field by itself.
[INDENT][INDENT][/INDENT][/INDENT] If the game had been run for one more year, the metagame SHOULD have shifted such that all elite (read: world championship contender) alliances would logically consist of
A Wallbot which could secure the middle pyramid of objects for it’s own alliance and which could cap the 30 goal like our original poster, 2W. These robots would be ranked poorly at the end of qualifiers due to their inability to score.
A super-stacking bot which could outscore 2 efficiency robots provided they did not have access to the middle pyramid. These robots would be low in ranking due to their reliance on wallbots for consistent success.
An efficiency bot belonging to a team ranked 1-8, which would be the alliance captain, and would not actually have to win any playoff matches that it participated in, provided the super stacker could post a score which the opponent simply did not have enough objects to beat, and provided the wallbot’s defense never failed.
It amazes me how much game analysis and theory (and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War)can be applied to Vex games. Just goes to show how well the GDC does their job.
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