So, there has been some activity online recentley that suggests some teams have developed or are developing a teir 3 hang or high stake mechanism. However, there is an interesting conundrum that arises with how a match affecting violation is ruled when an opponent blocks an attempt to achieve such a hang.
The scenario is as follows:
Red alliance: Has a teir 3 high stake capable robot that has demonstrated mostly consistent performance in achieving this, enough for an argument to be made that they could have done it had an interference not occured, BUT they could not demonstrate 100% consistency, maybe it fell off the rung at an earlier match, but enough to detract refs thinking they have 100% reliability.
Blue alliance: All the important context is that their relevant bot is strong enough to interfere with the red alliances hang attempts to sufficiently make it clear that they were interfering with the hang.
The match has been going strong, and red alliances only hope to win is if they execute on their high hang and high stake. They rush the climbing structure, and begin phase 1 of their climbing procedure. For simplicities sake, lets just say it counts as attempting a hang and nothing specific like a claw, hook, etc.
Blue alliance rushes in, and stops them from actually completing phase 1 of their hang,
In this scenario, blue gets a violation that may or may not be match affecting.
Since the calculation of wether or not a violation is match affecting is based on if the result of the match would have changed if it had not occured, blue argues that red was not going to land the hang, and the points the violation could have affected woule have been 3, for a teir 1 hang.
Red argues that, had blue not interfered, they would have made the full procedure and won the match.
How would this be counted? On one hand, red very easily could have won the match had blue not interfered, however on the other hand, they could have made it to teir 1, 2, 3, or done all 3 and gotten the high stake, and blue argues that it is unlikeley that red could have achieved this, which would make it not match affecting.
This question would either require the referee to fully understand red’s robot, either via watching, interviewing, etc to properly make a call, but volunteers are not expected to do so for every team at a competition.
If this referee did not have this knowledge, which they are not required to have, the valuation of the violation is quite literally impossible to determine, since it is essentially random chance to an uninformed ref if red made it to max potential or not.
How would this be rightly decided? A new rule? A coin flip? A replay? I would love to hear your thoughts!
