The manual allows refs to take very different positions on this I think. This is my biggest problem with the warnings system - it makes it hard for teams to know how strictly the rule will be enforced. Refs at events should be very clear about the progression (e.g. “if you do something similar again, I will have to disqualify you”), but between different events with different refs there’s a high level of uncertainty and that affects they way teams have to strategise.
Personally, I think the answer is that it would depend on whether the cube that the team scores in their opponents’ protected area is descoreable or not. In the former case, infinite.
Of course, the “match affecting” standard (i.e. does an action change the outcome of the match) isn’t a hard line. For any action there is a certain likelihood that the action affected the match outcome. In this Toss Up Q+A, Karthik said:
(Emphasis mine). In context Karthik was talking specifically about disqualifications for match affecting violations, not disqualifications for multiple warnings.
The way I have reffed this before is based partly on that thread. Warnings for more severe violations, that were more likely to affect the match outcome, count up more quickly. I would also not disqualify a team on a rule violation that was minor and didn’t get the offending alliance any closer to winning the game, even if the team had a lot of previous warnings. However, these minor violations do get recorded as warnings that make a future disqualification for violating the same rule more likely. This is just what I think is sensible. It’s consistent with everything the GDC has said; where the rules say “Teams that receive multiple warnings may also receive a Disqualification at the head referee’s discretion”, this is how I make those discretionary decisions.
If a team is going for a score of 108, They have to have won autonomous. As long as they have a full 7+8 skyrise and all their cubes scored they are guaranteed a win provided they have at least one post ownership point. The strategy in that case that maximises the team’s chance of winning is to put all their cubes in undescoreable positions. So if they score an undescoreable point in their opponents’ protected goal, they are doing something that makes them more likely to win (maybe a tiny amount more likely, but still more likely). If they did this every match, it would eventually escalate to a disqualification (even if they won every match by a large margin). The number of games it would take to reach that point would depend mostly on the margin of victory in those games.
If the cube they score is descoreable, and they could have scored it somewhere else, then the rule violation is making them less likely to win. If they did this every match, and the action didn’t interfere with their opponents’ building of the skyrise, and they never violated <SG9> in any other way, I would not disqualify them.
These are just my own thoughts. Before making these decisions I always talk to the other refs at the event, and that could make me see the situation differently. Also, I think this is only one of many decisions a reasonable ref could come to on this question (and like I said above, I don’t think that diversity of possible enforcement styles is a good thing for teams).
