At a recent competition I went to, the balls were cleared in around 1:15. After the robots were just spinning around for 30 seconds. I think the game needs another aspect, or something
Why lifting was introduced into NbN: the post
Agreed, maybe vex has a special worlds scoring object or something to take the last bit of time…
…high elevation?
I do agree, however, that there will be a fair amount of dead time at worlds.
If you could just descore the low goal…
Ikr, descoring devices would be so much fun to make and they would definitely lengthen the game, since there are usually quite a few balls that get accidentally pushed underneath the goal or simply miss the high goal.
Now we just have to figure out a way to get balls from the low goal to the high goal without crossing the plane or descoring the ball…
Vacuum? Sg12 would murder this strategy if vex doesn’t make an exception…
Ya, I know that vacuuming is illegal, which is why I said “without descoring the ball”. The robot would not be able to break the plane and the ball would not be able to come off the ground or cross the white line as it travels from the low goal to the high goal.
You would still “remove a ball from the goal” to the high goal
Its possible for a ball to be in both the low goal and the high goal at the same time, so it is possible to move a ball from the low goal to the high goal without the ball ever being descored. Eventually the ball would no longer be worth 1 point and would become high scored (worth 5 points), but throughout the whole process the ball would always be worth 1-5 points and would never be considered “descored” as the ball would never decrease in value.
Or what if balls that left the field were returned to the center of the field? This would make accuracy much more important because some robot that fires all of the preloads out of the field would be basically giving the opponents half of their preloads. Another idea is to allow teams to get extra points for lifting earlier than usual.
But I agree that the timing of the game is a bit off. With 40 “non-preload” balls on the field and two robots per alliance, that gives each alliance (assuming it takes 30 seconds to fire all of the preloads) 45 seconds for one robot and 75 for the other before the last 30 seconds of the match when lifting becomes legal. This adds up 105 seconds. Assuming each alliance gets 20 balls, this is basically 5 seconds per ball, or about a point per second. And this is before it’s legal to expand or lift. Most relatively good teams (at least at the competitions I’ve been at) are able to intake and shoot a stack of balls in far less than 20 seconds.
I have an idea for why there wont be dead time at worlds
defense:
we have seen very few field clears, and that is because of defense our robot has a very strong drive and we use it a lot for defense, and I think that we will see at worlds, the teams that win will focus both on scoring, and preventing the other team from scoring
My friend had the idea of giving an alliance the ability to de-score their own low goal so that you could try to score in the high goal again. I know that we’re a few months to late to change the rules, but I think that it would have been a good idea. Especially since any mechanism would require good engineering to get balls out of the low goal without expanding beyond 18"^3, and be fast enough to be worth the time.
Edit: When I clicked post, it posted twice, so I deleted the first one and then they both got deleted. I don’t know what happened.
It’s some weird glitch that I have also noticed. Don’t delete your post though, just refresh the page.
I have to agree with you on this! We have also not seen many fields cleared this year because of this. Clearing the field does happen during early eliminations matches and qualifiers, however in the finals matches, we have seen a lot of defense which prevents fields from being cleared but makes this game interesting. It is a very simplistic game but requires strategic driving and planning on how to prevent defense, elevate your alliance and score bonus balls before the opponents.
The ball has to be touching the tile to be considered to be in the low goal so moving it off the ground would descore it. Even if it is being scored from the low to high you would have to descore
You can get a ball into the high goal without lifting it off the ground. It would be very hard and truly impractical during a match, but there is a way.
The ball would literally have to teleport, so if this is what you are referring to, then, yes, there is a way
