To answer your question, this “hoard bot” strategy has explicitly been ruled legal multiple times. In the future, it would be good to search the Q and A before making a new threat that might ask an answered question. Similarly, throwing matches has explicitly been ruled illegal. However, it is possible that 404Z had a broken or malfunction robot during qualifications and was able to fix it before eliminations. In this case, there would be no penalty, since fixing a robot is not illegal. It seems like the information in your post is insufficient to make a call one way or the other, so my guess is the referees dealt with it appropriately. If you suspected a team of throwing matches during the tournament, you probably should have raised it with the event staff at that event.
As a side note, 404Z will be competing in the Central California State Championship this March. Defaming them by listing team number, as well as posting a picture of their robot presumably without their permission, is extremely rude and possibly harmful to their team and organization. In the future, please say “a team” without giving the specific number and do not post pictures of other teams’ robots without their permission. If we all abide by these guidelines, hopefully this community will continue to flourish.
Thank you, especially for the second part of your statement. For this competition, we had someone who had never driven before driving this robot. It is difficult to drive because of the speed of the robot, and the driver was very nervous, so he was incapable of driving well for the majority of the day. He did, however, attempt to capture opposing mobile goals throughout the day, or play other modes of defense as suggested by alliances, as was his strategy in the elimination rounds. If there are any other concerns regarding 404Z at this competition, please feel free to PM me.
One thing a lot of people fail to understand is that defensive bots are great in the elimination rounds with the right partners and not so great in the qualifying rounds. Additionally, there is a skill and experience factor with defensive bots. Some people think that anyone can easily build a defensive robot and drive it so identical success as anyone else. The fact is, to do defense effectively, it takes a well designed bot able to withstand harsh play without the protection other bots get and it takes skill and experience to drive it without burning out motors and being effective.
@Poseyhead nice job on that bot. One of my teams has a bot that has been mostly defensive all year, but is adding swappable subsystems to be either offensive or defensive. They currently have a 104 in driver skills and are working on getting their programming skills higher.
How many mogos can your bot control? It looks like it might be able to get all four with the cage and going under the bot. Very nicely done. Is your team in HS or MS? I have both.
Thank you, we built it as a temporary robot while we were working on another, long term robot. It can capture a total of 3 mogos. We are a high school team. I like the idea of the swappable subsystems, and we considered doing something similar, but we decided to instead focus on our other robot(s).