Ahh, that’s what happens when I go play Star Wars Battlefront 2… But yes. My team saw our first one at QCC, however it didn’t play the correct wall bot role, but we do expect to see more coming out the later it gets.
haha, and nice Robot Skills! Our coder, Owen, wrote a programming skills code today for 24. We are hoping to get it up to 32 soon. And I wish we got some assistance for the travel costs… Our school pays nothing, we get all of our money from the U.S. Department of Defense, but they don’t pay for travel. 
I disagree. Rules such as “Common sense applies” and “A robot may not pose an unnecessary risk of entanglement” and “Intentional damage may not be caused to other robots” are all heavily open to interpretation as to what the rule suggests, and I personally think that the way these rules are interpreted often allows gameplay to become too aggressive so that the risk of damaging robots is very high.
Where does one call a risk of entanglement “unnecessary”?
How far does one allow “common sense” to interfere with the rules and gameplay?
When should damage be called “intentional”?
I don’t think the rules are as black and white as you say.
Wow, that sounds like an awesome Programming skills run, if you are able to make it consistent. I definitely want to see video of that, whether it be before or after worlds!
At least the travelling costs are much lower for most American teams, whereas NZ teams have to pay for international flights (although I guess flights from the other side of the US would be really expensive as well). Also, it used to be very hard for New Zealand teams to qualify, as we usually only have two competitions each year that the winners qualify for worlds. Of course, the skills way of qualifying teams this year means that a lot more international teams have the potential to qualify.
I’ll try to get a video once its all tested and we have our field set up. And that is true, flights would be more expensive. But it’s also hard for our team, since we are the only VEX robotics team in our state, so nobody really knows what they are funding. The only way we got to worlds last year was because our school gave us $4000, which we were so great full for.
What we’ve done for at least the past two years…
Last year we were “nearly definitely” not going due to cost, this year we “probably aren’t”. The price especially for countries far away like here in NZ, as you would know, is ridiculous. As much as I hope we (Free Range) go this year, I wouldn’t count on it.
~George
i see what u did thar 
does your team/school fund-raise at all?
we used to sell hex bugs
and now we are doing public and private robot demos to see if anyone will be interested to donate to our club and if the donation is above a certain amount, their company will be advertised on our team shirts and robot! 
yeah, we sorta fund raise, but its hard when your town has a little over 2000 people in it haha. well wallbots, ya know.