The main problem with this is that being able to score balls by pushing them in from the bottom is an intentional part of the game’s design, as all the challenges so far have been designed to allow for a pushbot to score. A better solution might be to change the rule to only score the highest combination of 3 of the balls in the goal (for example, if there was two 2pt balls and 2 1pt balls, the only balls scored would be the two 2pts and one of the 1pts), but obviously this rule would only work for LRT and not inperson matches.
Could you post a picture of how this is done?
Not OP, but that’s just a theoretical maximum based on the number of openings where balls could be held against the goal. Each side of the middle goal has 3 places where balls can be pressed against it and be considered scored. In theory, you can score 1 ball in each of these places plus 3 in the goal itself, making a total of 15.
Actually doing this with a robot would be another matter entirely.
Edit: I stand corrected, apparently you can fit 27 balls.
So they are just theoretical values. No robot would likely be able to do them unless it was specifically designed to do it.
Yes, you’d need to design a bot specifically for holding balls in to get more than 6-7.
which isn’t all that unrealistic. it wouldn’t be all that difficult to make some wings or somethin you can use to hold and press additional balls against the sides of a goal.
whether or not that’s a good idea is a different discussion entirely.
The difficult part I think would be how to both be able to score normally and also be able to load the wings when you want to. I guess you could have some kind of pooper-like mechanism that feeds balls into the wings. You’d also probably have to sacrifice a motor for opening/closing them.
It would be an interesting engineering challenge, for sure.
It may not have been designed to be played like that, but teams knew an hour before the reveal that if you got a diagonal in a match you basically won.
But it was made to do that by putting your team’s balls on top, not to mention the opponents could descore it. Swinging those 3 goals was what the game is meant to be, not stuffing them beyond return.
My point is that it’s a swing game. Some tower takeover matches ended 30 seconds early because all the cubes were gone, this just doesn’t happen in swing games. Stuffing the goals, having no ownership will mean matches will have idle time at the end of the match. Allowing double ownership, doing something at all to add the function of descoring.
The very nature of LRT for Change Up is that it attempts to turn a swing game into a non-swing game. If anything, having more options and doing more difficult tricks than normal gameplay makes it a lot more fun than otherwise. What do you think would happen if there was a 3 ball limit in each goal? People would just max out the X and it would be easy because scoring normally isn’t hard. Now that we can score more than 5 in a goal, multiple different strategies present themselves as viable, and the diagonal lock doesn’t exist due to limited resources.
But to that I bring back double ownership. The number of balls in a goal won’t matter if there’s double ownership. You do get more options when you can connect more rows, but the current rules will result. I think there should be more balls allowed to score in goals.
It doesn’t matter to me what the nature is when we have the full capability to change that nature. Vex has a historical opportunity to create a swing game with no other robots on the field, a task that seems impossible on paper, and we are letting it remain impossible. The issue is, the solution to this opportunity is on the high shelf, and we all need to hop on each other’s shoulders to reach this shelf.
We are all failing, every single one of us is letting our neighbors down by remaining compliant to the flawed system. This game is meant to be a battle to the end, and by letting it end early because teams were just ‘done’ means we failed.
So many people were so quick to criticize change up, so many people wanted worlds in person, so many people say change up is a terrible game. Where are those people? If they didn’t like it why aren’t they trying to fix it?
When your robot has a problem, you’re supposed to fix it, what makes the game were competing on any different? The GDC listens, the GDC hears our voices, they’ve been so willing throughout all the years to fix a flaw, to help us out. Heck, they changed the entire skills field just for us. But nobody is using their voices.
You can’t hear without sound.
That will probably be my final message on the topic, at least for a bit. I’m sure you understand why and I’m also sure you’re not upset by this.
That sounds all nice an inspirational, but gdc is not going to somehow redo change up and fix it so that it’s a back and forth game during LRT. Because there isn’t enough time, it would be a huge pain for all the teams that have already had to readjust to a new change up once, and because it’s virtually impossible because of the very nature of LRT.
But what goal stuffing allows is a more difficult, longer game than what was intended. If you only had 3 balls per goal, the match would be over in 30-45 seconds, and tie almost every time. But with the overfilling, there is a lot more strategy and effort that goes into winning a match, which is why it’s a good thing imo.
So we can ask gdc to make skills better, we can ask them to fix problems with the field (like the ball locking corner goals problem the field used to have), but I think it’s unreasonable to ask them to change the entire game in a way that is almost impossible. We can’t expect perfection from an inherently imperfect and unplanned situation, and I think that the gdc is doing the best that they can given the circumstances. They just had the crummiest of luck that the easiest, most back and forth reliant game happened to occur during the year that teams couldn’t play together on the same field, and there is only so much they can do to improve that situation.
Thank you,
It’s a swing game as robots are now. The reason for this is that scoring 6-8 balls in the corners and edges are so much easier than doing 6-8 balls in the center. If you remember that each alliance quadrupled ball is 8 points, there are a fair amount of cases where you can lose with diagonal. Clearly you have not looked into the strategy enough.
However, robots that can score 9 or more balls in the center quickly without sacrificing the other 4 rows will change the swing game. I don’t think this will happen even at worlds.