If I wasn’t graduating this year, I’d be absolutely livid (though I am mad).
Originally most of us thought the ban on anodization would be limited to just China. However, @lacsap 's clarification on such a topic came true.
Very much a shame. First the GDC came after license plates, now they’re coming after coloring parts. I thought license plates was bad… this is gonna force orgs to throw out thousands of dollars of parts. Vast swaths of law-abiding teams used paint/anodization, wayyy more than 3D printed license plates. And I doubt that the “ooooooh a couple illegal titanium c-channels” problem was so widespread, so rampant, and provided such an overwhelming advantage to robots that the GDC had to nuke an entire aspect of team spirit and trash thousands of expensive parts.
They’re on the path to make V5RC like VIQ, where modifications of any part (even for fun for creativity, or for team spirit) is going to be outlawed. I wouldn’t be surprised if next season they got rid of all non-functional decorations altogether, and VEX starts selling “legal” decorations.
It is also extremely infuriating cause this might ban colored screws. Many teams love using the robosource colored screws, helps with quickly identifying screw sizes, making building, CAD-ing, and sorting much much easier. The wording of this rule is a bit vague (“legal VEX part”, not necessarily “legal Robosource part”), so hopefully the GDC in their quest to clamp down on team spirit lets us keep our convenient colored screws.
P.S. The manual’s example of a piece of aluminum plate being showed as a legal license plate is now illegal, since the GDC made coloring such plates illegal. Nice one guys.
