End of Year Thoughts on Tipping Point/Hopes for Worlds and Next Years game

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion VRC > Tipping Point (21/22)
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Worlds is coming up soon, the Tipping Point season is almost over. This was a fun season, one of my team’s best so far. So, like what the title says, what are your thoughts of Tipping Point now that the season is almost at an end? What do you hope to see at worlds? And for those continuing on for another season of VRC or VEXU, what are your hopes for next year’s game?

Here are some of mine:

I personally really enjoyed Tipping point at the start of the season, and I really think it had a lot of potential as a game. However, some things just made it not nearly as good as it could have been. I think a big thing that made it not as fun as it could have been was rules.

This year’s rules sucked, IMHO.

For example: Pneumatics. A huge, huge, advantage for teams that could afford them- when they were even in stock. This made it really hard for underfunded teams or teams that couldn’t get access to them. Teams that had them, and had a lot of them had a huge advantage, and could do many things that teams without them couldn’t. Now, I’m not saying that using pneumatics in a competition is a bad thing; I personally like pneumatics. But I think that Vex/Recf should have made it clear that pneumatics were going to be made legal a season or two beforehand, to give teams time to save up and buy them, to level the playing field some. Or, at the very least, they should have made sure that they had enough stock to keep up with a whole bunch of teams ordering them for the first time in several years.

Another big example, SG3.
I’m not really sure what the GDC was thinking with this. It started out okay, but turned into an unfixable monstrosity pretty fast. Anyone who wants to know more about this can search on the forum and read the many different threads about it.

The removal of the rule where Identical parts to vex ones were legal caused a lot of problems. I kind of understand why this was done, to stop issues where people would show up with things like 3d printed gears, thinking that they were functionally identical. But this caused a lot of issues with things like robosource standoffs, colored pneumatic tubing, non vex rubber bands and zip ties. Persoally, I think that something like an explanation box that clarified what was “functionally identical”; same sized zip ties/rubber bands were, 3d printed gears the same size as vex ones or compliance wheels from other sellers were not.

And of course, the removal of people being able to compete with cortex was a big problem when pretty much everything V5 was out of stock.

Now, of course, Tipping point was very fun at the beginning. We saw lots of robot to robot interactions, complex reveals, and lots of robot diversity. However, I think that that fell apart pretty quickly once a meta was discovered.
But, unfortunately, I think that it got pretty boring, from a drivers and spectator perspective; it was nothing more than get neutral goals in auton, then sit in a corner with 2 or 3 goals, feed rings, and double park/stack all goals.
I also wish there had been more teams going for high goal/ short neutral goals. I feel like there not as many teams who did go for it as there could have been, and that made it kind of boring.

All in all, I think tipping point could have been balanced a little bit better, I feel like the GDC bit off more than they could chew rules-wise with such a complex game.

/bashing tipping point.

I do definitely hope to see more robot diversity at worlds, and expect to. I’m also glad that worlds is in person this year, after 2 years of virtual worlds.

Next year, I hope for a more balanced game; hopefully one that inspires as much robot diversity as this year (and hopefully more), while not being as complex as this one (which, of course, isn’t easy). I also hope that Pneumatics aren’t as much of a big deal as they were this year; This year, there were so many possible things that could be done with them; goal clamps, ptos, goal covers, high post preload/scoring mechanisms, etc. For Change Up, however, I can only think of a few uses; the always viable 2 speed drive, possibly a pto between drive and intake rollers, although I don’t know how effective that would be, and actuating intakes.

Oh, I also want something that has either a tall lifting game, like ITZ, or a shooting game like TP or NBN.

But, I think that that’s enough of mine, let’s hear yours.

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I really hope that it’s not as bad as Change Up.

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I’m pretty much in agreement with your thoughts on tipping point.

The game had a ton of potential which I thought was largely squandered by the way the manual dictated the gameplay. My primary issue with the game is of course how the importance of the goal rush essentially determines the outcome of high level matches before driver control even begins. Any game where the winning strategy is to sit around for a 1:30 is, at it’s core, flawed. There could have been a lot of interesting strategies around scoring rings more frequently on the tall goal, and the short neutral branches, but because of the importance of the rush, these strategies are seldom used. The tall goal is finally getting some use as we approach worlds, but the short neutral branches are just entirely useless from a game strategy point.

I still think the interesting game peices have caused very cool robots to emerge from this season, and that’s probably my favorite thing about the game. Even though the strategies themselves are quite boring, the robots people have made to execute these strategies have been varied, intricate, and have been an excellent engineering challenge. So in this metric, tipping point was just a very superior game. But in most other metrics, I felt it was lacking.

Of course, you mention the manual and rules as something that detracted greatly from the season, and I would 100% agree with that. We all know how terrible things like sg3, and the altering of many fundamental rules like the commodity hardware rule have caused unnecessary and completely avoidable problems. Because possessing a goal majority is so crucial in this game, teams are either forced to play incredibly aggressive and vicious, or accept a loss. But then sg3 is incredibly punishing of the behavior this game demands of teams trying to win.

I also think the scoring was pretty unbalanced in this game, goals were worth far more than I think they should have been. Alliance goal rings I thought were fairly balanced, as are tall goal rings, but short neutral branches should have been worth more, at least 5 points each in my opinion.

And I also think this game could have benefitted from some method of scoring which is independent of goals, because since all points stem from having goals, the alliance that has more goals will simply win in a high level match. I think having some stationary scoring posts around the field perimeter would have been a good addition to the game to solve this problem.

My other issue with this game has been the quality of the components. The goals have been very prone to breaking, especially the neutral goals, and I’ve gone through 3 of them this year without being particularly rough. But the primary problem with the field was the platform. In all my years of doing vex (starting in starstruck), the platform has been the most problematic field element by a huge margin. I’ve have 3 platforms break on my throughout the season, 2 of them had the polycarbonate side walls break off, and one of them simply snapped in half. And in so many high level events I attended, the event had to do something janky in order to make the platforms usable by the teams. The norcal signature event had to jam rings between the platform and the field to stabilize them, LA states had to use tape on the field to stop the platform from getting stuck on it, and even at worlds recf has had to make modifications to the field (jamming a c channel between the platform leg and the perimeter). And a lot of the problems with sg3 were driven by parts of the rules meant to address some of the physical shortcomings of the platform. The platforms could have been designed with some sort of base that prevented goals from going underneath it, which would have eliminated parts of sg3 which have been very problematic. Platforms have also been very annoying to assemble, disassemble, and transport from an event partner’s perspective.

I really did love this game early in the season, where matches weren’t so competitive that they were decided in the first 5 seconds and sg3 hardly mattered because nobody felt compelled to be so aggressive around the opponent’s platform. But as the season progressed, I’ve come to like this game less and less. I still think this game has been better than change up, which is in my opinion, the worst vrc game ever made. But I know it could have been so much better than it was. It’s not a terrible game to end my vrc journey on though, and I know it could have been worse as well as better.

I hope next year’s game preserves the engineering challenges and varied robot design this game had, while also having more enjoyable matches and strategies, and I hope the gdc has exercised a little more <g3> when writing the manual.

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Early season was great, now it just comes down to winning the goal rush and hiding in a corner for the rest of the match.

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This one is more personal and less game related but here it goes:

I think this year was a big learning process for my team. We just came out of COVID lockdowns and are a brand-new team with no experience competing personally. (For reference, none of us had used gear ratios before :flushed:) We were lucky to have older teams within our school who helped to teach us the ropes and share equipment. As a team we made a lot of mistakes, but they turned out to be really big learning experiences on deadlines, running a team, building, and coding. I’m excited for next year to put our learning opportunities into practice. For as much as we messed up this year, I wouldn’t change it for the world as I think we gained a lot of experience from it.

I hope for a great game next year (hopefully with shooting), and more opportunities to experiment with new robots and challenges. I hope for a very balanced game that has a lot of different options for scoring. I hope there are changes so there isn’t an SG3 for the next year (the idea, not the actual rule).

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This is actually a really amazing point, and I think having posts in the corners to put rings onto would have been a significant game changer. Probably would have seen a lot more high branch scoring on the tall neutral goal with this, and certainly more robot diversity, as this would have given some chance to overcome a two-goal deficit.

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Though not being the best game ever, this game is one of the to have your first year on. I have learned a lot this year and hope to do vex next year!

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This is a small point, I agree with you completely, but balancing robots on platforms was a way to score points independent of goals.

Agree completely here. My team was not really rough at all with our field, but still had some breaking. Only thing I can think of that close to as bad as this years field was cu goals clamping down on balls.

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This might be controversial but I actually really like the goal rush part of this game. I’d rather it not always be the difference in the match, but I’m also glad it’s still a super vital part of the game. All the different strategies and methods to approach goal rushing really gets my brain cranking. I love how chess-like it is, and how you always have to be thinking 5 steps ahead of the opponent. I love how theoretical all these special goal rush mechanisms we will see at worlds are. Special Mechanism A may win goals 9/10 times at worlds, but may lose to Special Mechanism B. and so you have to think of a way to now counter Special Mechanism B in case you have to face it. and so on. But all of that is all theoretical. It’s very intriguing and has definitely occupied my mind many nights at 1 am.

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You think it takes Tipping Point to occupy your mind at 1 am, though? I’m in IQ, and I lie in bed thinking of ways of solving problems we don’t even have. (And yes, lie is the correct verb, not lay.)

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What I loved is the fact that, at least before, it was extremely competitive. It was a very fair and fluid game. Even though rule abuse ended up ruining the game for many, I think without the goal hoard rule the game could be revitalized. I think that the battle bots like mood of Tipping point is needed for every game after, because another change up can’t happen again. I hope that spin up is going to be a competitive, head to head game instead of like the current Vex IQ game, where it’s extremely boring and I genuinely dislike it.

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I tend to agree with this. I think the big issue is with the goals just getting locked down, not with there being a goal rush. Having a rush to get a majority of goals is a good thing, but the team with more goals just sitting there for 1:30 is not. I feel like all games should always have active movement.

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I think a simple rule change, to eliminate hoarding and add a possession limit, would have made this game much more interesting over the course of a whole season of competition. It would have had to have been early in the season, so I think putting off the “2.0” update, where significant rule changes can be made, into September or even early October might be something for the GDC to consider for 2022-2023.

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I love how innovative the game is. So many designs to optimize the game.

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Already a thread for this

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Where, which one? All of them that I have seen have been sufficiently different. And this one actually has some acceptably intellectual discussion, which has been missing on the forums lately.

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I thought Tipping Point was a great game to start robotics with (Like me) and it convinced me to become a team captain for my future team.

What I didn’t like about Tipping point was the platform rules like the rule of losing points when your alliance hits the opposing seeaw, it used to be 30 second mark before it was changed to 15 and the goal going under the seesaw rule. That one was strange to me.

My team got disqualified two times unfairly because of these rules and my alliance in eliminations.

I’m really looking forward to worlds, and the new game Spin Up, of course!

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Nvm its a dead thread. Carry on.

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One of the cool things (at least in my opinion) about tipping point was how bot designs continued to advance: from just holding goals to holding goals and double parking, to throwing in getting rings on the bottom branches (or some teams putting preloads on top branch), the progression was cool to see, especially after how Change Up went. For it being my last year, it really wasn’t that bad.

With that…

The rules and that were extremely dicey at best. Ignoring the entire issue with pnuematics, or really anything people tried to order throughout the season (I don’t think the GDC can see the future and anticipate part shortages like that), part of the time it felt like rule changes were made by closing your eyes and throwing a dart at a spinning board. It also felt like they weren’t really reading the rule changes they were making (see that one week in December where rings would get you DQed under SG3), and wouldn’t even make a attempt to really clarify anything (see: one word Q&A responses and/or the world’s driver meeting.) Basically, while the robot designs progressed, it felt like the rules regressed.

The rules weren’t the only problem on the administrative side though. The giant lack of support for refs throughout the season was not good, and was glaringly obvious too. All year, there have been complaints of refs (see: many disgruntled teams after whenever their state/provincial comp was) and I think it’s likely more as a result of the lack of support available. The Referee Training didn’t come out until the end of November, and even then, it had errors that (correct me if I’m wrong here) were never fixed. It’s kinda ridiculous, we have all these volunteers come and help out. but we can’t get the bare minimum out in terms of supporting them? Overall, I feel like whoever is in charge of the training stuff really needs to get their crap together for Spin Up, because what happened here can’t happen again.

As for next year, I’m not sure. Obviously, I won’t be competing (hs senior and all that jazz), but I think there’s currently some plans in the work for me to mentor some teams. I think it’d be cool to see some sort of shooting game again, but to Xenon’s point, more than anything else I think the game needs to have tasks that are completely independent of each other that are worth similar amount of points, to encourage teams to pick one task or the other.

Overall, Tipping Point wasn’t a terrible way to go out on, and I don’t have many regrets about the season at large. Good luck to everyone at Worlds, and here’s to next year being great.

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While I think the different mechanism and that chess like game play is a very fun brain game, I also feel that its only in that 15 seconds and more so like 3 seconds that the rush happens while the auton is going. I kinda wish for a game that has less auton “interference” because all I really could end up doing would be making a goal rush where I drive forward. I wish I could have a more complex auton to better my programing skills.

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