I would like to discuss the merits of the effective defensive strategies, but separate from the circumstances of this specific event. There are good reasons why RECF has procedures to address such specifics privately.
I could totally imagine that if I was a liaison for one of the VRC sponsors, like US Army or Air Force, and I saw defensive performance of 62A or 1721G at the Dome, I would be calling RECF to express my delight and excitement.
I would congratulate them on developing a great game that is well balanced. Where, to win on the highest level, you need to tackle both defense and offense and think both strategically and engineeringly outside of the box. And this is exactly the kind of thinking required for the designers of our future systems.
On the other hand, if I was a middle school teacher, taking my first year teams to the states. And I was teaching them all season long how to analyze the scoring and design the robot to play the game, and they were just starting to understand gear ratios, and were almost having their intakes working, and were beginning to be proud of their season’s work and, finally, starting to gain some confidence…
And then a team showed up with 8 motor pushbot and destroyed everyone at the competition, causing my students to come to me almost crying and saying that they don’t think they will be returning back to robotics next year…
Well, I would definitely not be delighted because, just as my students were making fragile progress and building some confidence, somebody slapped together a pushbot over the weekend and threw all our season’s hard work and progress under the bus. And it caused damage to me, personally, by taking away my students’ motivation to participate in VRC, which is an important tool in my teacher’s toolbox in getting them to learn about engineering design process, gear ratios, levers, programming, etc…
You could say that this is an over-dramatization and not all students will quit, some will learn from this, and come back next season, determined to build better robots. And, if students are not ready to learn about game strategy, maybe they should stick with VEX IQ, where everyone is nice and friendly, and winning strategy is teamwork and not an aggressive driving.
To which I will reply that sometimes IQ is not an option, and not all first year students are ready to talk strategies, and that GDC should have done a better job balancing the game at the beginner level, so that dumb aggressive pushboting is not going to get you enough points to be unstoppable.
I don’t think anyone is going to disagree that VRC mission is not to find the “best” robot, but to guide students through the process of learning and to provide motivation.
This should work for the beginners, where skills and progress are fragile, and all the way up to the expert level, where skills are robust end everyone is ready for heavily strategic and defensive play.
However, then we arrive at the contradiction, because all VRC teams compete in the same environment, governed by the same set of rules listed in the Game Manual, but we would like to have slightly different environments, best suited for each skill level, to achieve our main goal of optimal students’ motivation and education.
One way to avoid such contradiction is to design the game with intricate scoring levels and protections. Another way is to have people running the events understand very well both the game rules as written and the ultimate goals and mission of VRC and how they could achieve them by exercising some freedom and discretion within the official rules interpretation.
But you have to be honest: not everyone who is associated with VRC has fully read and understood the Game Manual and watched all VRC training videos. Many people, some of whom are charged with running competitions, think that they know better and come with preconceptions about the game rules, that may be totally wrong, and without realizing it. Also, it is not helping that VRC terminology is sometimes very confusing to outsiders.
For example, even after many years of spectating VRC, it still confuses me that aggressive driving and contact gameplay is called “Defense”, while the peaceful attempts of the robots to mind their own business and score game objects is called “Offense”.
Also, I find it extremely confusing that the “Design Award” has almost nothing to do with the effective robot design and is actually documentation award and, as of recently, “Innovate” award is no longer for innovative robots but is a second place documentation award.
My point is: despite RECF attempts to communicate VRC rules with Game Manual, training videos, volunteer guides, and certification programs, there will always be individuals who misunderstand game rules thanks to their preconceptions about how the game should be played.
I am not really sure what else RECF could do to improve consistency of applying game rules by the volunteers, who may have signed up the morning of the competition, and are tasked to judge or enforce the rules, while having very vague understanding of what’s going on.
P.S. I did in fact witness a middle school team who’s driver was ready to burst into tears after being pushed around by a basic multi-motor pushbot. It was perfectly legal, but wasn’t amusing, wasn’t cool, and was painful to watch as the “offensive” robot was struggling to score.
On the other hand, when my son’s high school team went to U.S. Open with a robot specifically designed to resist heavy defense, it was still mercilessly pushed for the whole duration of one of the qualification matches by a skillfully driven defense bot. And that was, actually, ironic and fun to watch.