It’s been almost 5 months since the launch of High Stakes, and now that MOA and other early season competitions have ended, I wanted to supply some of my reflections, and would love to hear all of your reflections as well. Of course these are all my personal opinions, and you are free to disagree, but PLEASE for the love of everything holy, do not argue in here.
We already have 2 metas on how to score rings on mobile goals, and both of them can be tuned to be equally as good as the other. And since there aren’t a whole lot of strategy changes imminent, as opposed to Over Under, these could very well be meta the rest of the season.
X-drives and hex drives have been overhyped right now. They are great, don"t get me wrong, but they’re not worth the time and effort needed, especially since essentially every single early season bot has to be completed in about half the time of a normal mid or late season bot.
The most common match strategy so far is gaining quick control of the positive corners, and this strategy would likely be the longest-lasting one, as the largest point swaying occurs in the corners, especially early season with not a whole teams actively pursuing scoring on wall stakes.
Those are my 2 cents, and I would love to hear any additions or critiques on my take.
I have thought about this long and hard. Here are my thoughts.
There are 2 ways that matches could (and hopefully will) get fixed.
Robots will get better over time. Teams will build better wall stakes mechs, better descore mechs, and possibly some higher elevations. Then, camping in the corner will become less lucrative as scoring. This is when matches will get interesting.
The GDC is going to do a major game rework. And we’re talking about everything getting switched up. I can’t even try to predict what it’s going to look like, but it will be different.
A major reword is not going to happen. There will be tweaks to be sure, but major rework has never been the norm. I would instead count on this:
Robots will get better over time. Teams will build better wall stakes mechs, better descore mechs, and possibly some higher elevations. Then, camping in the corner will become less lucrative as scoring. This is when matches will get interesting.
I, for one, would like the Sept game update to better encourage wall-stakes. I believe that the SG4 rule needs to be reworked to change the incentive/disincentive structure around wall-stakes. Affording some level of protection against SG4 violations for a robot manipulating Rings on the wall-stake seems reasonable (both for scoring and descoring). It is much easier to prevent someone from accessing the Wall Stake than it is manipulating Rings on them. Then, factor in the SG4 DQ risk for manipulating a Ring on the Wall-Stake, and there’s a reasonable interpretation for why teams are not focusing on that aspect of gameplay.
Reducing the Auton bonus from 6 to 4 would also not be unprecedented. I think they did that either in Tipping Point or Spin Up early season.
I believe the general agreement among the community is that the current strategy of guarding positive corners for most of the match isn’t particularly interesting.
A lot of people have been discussing both here and in other topics what they would change about High Stakes, both in regards to the above issue and other parts of the game. I was curious to see which options were most popular, so I made a poll.
What would you change about High Stakes (choose 1 to 3 options)?
Increase points for wall stakes
Alter the impact of the corner modifiers
Add protection for the negative corners / extend endgame protection
change to make wall stake scoring less risky
Increase hang points
No change; let strategy change naturally as robots become more capable
Other
0voters
My personal choice would be to change the positive corners from a 2x multiplier to a 1.5x multiplier, so the advantage of the positive corner isn’t as great and can more easily be countered by scoring on other mobile goals and wall stakes. The bad part about this is it would result in non whole number scores (icky) . Still, I’m interested in what others have to say on this!
*Sorry, the option that says “change to make wall stake scoring less risky” should say “ change to make wall stake scoring less risky” to differentiate it from “increase points for wall stakes”
It’s not the exact same scoring, but a flat +1 point/ring scored on mobile goals placed in a positive corner could decrease the value of camping corners while still maintaining whole-number scores (2x->1.75x for full goals, 1.6x for half full goals, 1.33x for goals with 1 ring).
There’s not a whole lot you can do to change up the scoring corner wise, since my guess would be that the GDC doesn’t want match scores to end up in decimal places. But I am in favor of either changing the points for climbing, especially at the third level, and also increasing wall stake points.
i agree with the first part, right now as previously mentioned most teams are focusing their strategy on the (+) corners and it would make the game much more interesting if there was some sort of bonus for wall stakes
another thing i really wanna see is more incentive to get the high stake. even with the added high stake bonus its literally only 2 points per climb.
If you are referring to descoring rings off of mobile goals, then, in my opinion, there are more efficient ways of descoring. Assuming you can pull two rings off the mobile goal, this would be a 2-4pts lost for the opposing alliance depending on if/what rings are left on the stake. Tipping a mobile goal will likely cause a similar loss of points in a lesser amount of time. Or, best yet, moving it the negative corner, if the goal is full, is -16pts for the opposing alliance,
In order to get a high skills score, teams will need a robot that can remove the blue rings that start on the mobile stakes, so it is definitely worth prototyping a mechanism to descore.
and 18522R had a much simpler version of it that, while it can only score one ring at a time, feeds directly from their hooks and doesn’t need the hood tilting like 360X