It was a local rule change. These are summer school program working with limited parts and time.
It did make it easier for all the teams to have robots that were able to hang, the requirement was to have them off of the floor. Since most teams didn’t have programming skills there was no autonomous period. All other rules were in effect.
You may have seen a number of Q&A entries from Blake and I, it was an outcome of the matches we had. And yes we did have a robot hang and then have the battery fall off.