I personally do not like that repositioning in the college game is allowed. However, I obviously don’t know anywhere near as much about making good game rules as the GDC does, so I’m not calling for it’s removal. This is just a poll to see how many people like and dislike this rule.
We cannot change the rules but we can change the way we play the game.
In new Zealand we are being questioned by industry on the relevance of a robot competition for University students that does not stretch their capabilities. This is an issue that we cannot avoid as it has sponsorship implications that will impact on the continued existence of University teams here.
As a result our Universities have unilaterally decided not to reposition their robots or touch them during the competition in local inter-university competitions.
Who will join us in making this decision for the worlds. We do not need the GDC’s permission to do this and, if we all agree, we believe the University competition will be all the better and more relevant for it.
I’m not touching our bots period. Only thing I would do is if i somehow forgot to turn on the bot. No repositioning, designing senors into the bot for a long accurate auton mode.
- Andrew
CSM is on board. 
My team will be on board, if I can get a team together.
If we get a team up next year at UBC, we’ll probably not use repositioning. I feel that repositioning won’t be quite as big a benefit as it was in Gateway, so you should be able to do well staying off the starting tile for long stretches of time. However, I’m not sure about activating buttons; there’s a definite advantage to using that.
Some selected thoughts from AURA members, from another thread:
Andrew (Chairperson):
Scott (Pre-repositioning programmer):
Vincent:
To be honest, AURA is very disappointed that this rule is still around. We aren’t sure if we will come to Worlds next year and repositioning is a major factor.
However, we are looking forward to playing without repositioning in the events ChrisHam mentioned :).
MSU seemed to like repositioning a lot in Gateway. I’ll have to talk to them sometime and see what they think of it this year.
Please do, we’d be interested in understanding the opinions of people who support repositioning in College. Its 5% approval rating in this thread’s poll clearly shows that that position isn’t exactly common, and we thought that the 2012 World Champs were an ample demonstration that the rule had failed.
But we’d love to hear what MSU have to say, if they disagree.
There will be an update to the College Challenge rules posted by the end of this week.
-John
Purdue will not be repositioning this year as well.
This may affect MSU’s stance; Their coach measures their success based on whether or not they beat Purdue.
That’s certainly an interesting way to look at it.
Although, I wonder if there’s any teams that would have contingencies for ramming and the like. Any team can ram, most can do multiple repositioning runs, good teams can perfect autonomous routes, but maybe only the best will be able to plan for any situation that happens on the field, regardless of what their autonomous does.
I believe that turning that robot should have counted as illegal
buttons were okay but when a robot was winning the programming skills without programming there was a problem and they fixed but didn’t learn from the mistake
my team at one tournament put a dozen bumber sensors on our robot and i was able to turn drive and pick up and raise arm to score
guess what that is inefficient so it isnt abusing the rule
summary
The rule should stay in spirit but maybe a limit on force exerted on robot
flipping switch or pushing button versus picking up robot
haha I was not aware of this. Looks like we will have some nice Big 10 competition this year then 
I think I’m gonna go with Chuck on this one…
This is my very humble opinion, but it does seem wrong to me to be called a “cheater” for something that doesn’t violate any rules. For the longest time, man was told that we couldn’t fly, and yet some very brave individuals “cheated” and broke that rule.
Yes, there is such a thing as the “spirit of the law” but at the same time, who cares? While there are certain things the GDC does not like, they usually put that into writing in the rules. (like purely defensive bots) Honestly? Maybe someone from the GDC wants to clarify this, but I know I’d want to see the most competitive creative robots ever, regardless of how some people are interpreting the “spirit” of the rules.
That being said, the original reason this post was started? Personally, I’d say go for the ultimate challenge. Take away the re-positioning. Make it really hard, (and yet really easy to ruin) a good autonomous. We are in college after all.
One thought: Has the GDC considered making a bonus for college (and maybe even high-school) for teams that forget about driver-controlled period, and just have a completely autonomous robot(s)? Totally random I know, but I think that could be cool.
I like my driver time thank you very much.
- Andrew
Information on this update can be found here:
This is why VEX is awesome. They collected feedback from their community, weighed their options, and made a change that I think puts the college challenge at a higher level of competition. Well done. Can’t wait to see what some of the college teams come up with this year.
Well, you’re assuming that other teams won’t be able to push you back. You do sound more than a little condescending in these past two posts. If you’re implementing a 10 line code, then you’re presumably not going to be doing to much other more than pushing other’s around (unless you have terrible programming etiquette, then I guess you could fit a lot of code into ten lines). You can program whatever you’d like, but I’m not sure why you think your "ten lines " will beat the “thousands of lines” that other people work on. Are you so much smarter than the rest of us that you’ve thought of some strategies that we wouldn’t even begin to understand, much less code around?