So, everyone’s either focused on worlds or thinking about next year, but I’m really interested to hear what people think ITZ. What do you like? What do you hate? How does ITZ compare the other games you’ve done?
I don’t like this year mainly for one reason: design convergence this year has been awful! I think this is partially because teams are becoming less independent and more reliant on the forums (hence the amount of posts about “how can I build a robot like this?” and partially because of the design of the game. I think the GDC should design games with simpler scoring objects so that there are a lot more ways to effectively score the game pieces. Last year we say every team using a claw, because the odd shape of the stars made it almost ineffective to use any other type of collection device. From the beginning of this year we’ve pretty much only seen rd4b’s with roller intakes. I’m not commenting on the effectiveness of this design, but I think the game should allow for more originality instead of supporting design convergence.
Best Vex game of all time. Still a few problems, but really great. I think that defense could be more restricted, and I think that the positions of the mobile goals at the start of the match should be less conducive to defense during autonomous.
Edit: @meng brought up the fact that there are people in vex who have been doing this for way longer than me. I have absolutely no experience with vex games before sack attack, so read my above response with that in mind.
Personally, I feel that defense should be more active than it already is. I’m essentially recommending descoring. I totally agree with the placement change of the mogos. At one of our competitions, there was a dual cage bot that grabbed the first two mogos near the stationary goal in autonomous.
You think that people should be able to knock over stacks??
I’ve always thought that being able to descore any mobile goal cones not in the 10 or 20 point zones would be a good idea in theory, but this would lead to tipping and a lot of cones being thrown outside of the field, and many many other issues.
I’m not necessarily saying that, but rather a descoring option near the last 30 seconds. It might probably be one cone at a time and only the stat goal to keep things fair as well.
I can’t see why I would ever stack on the stationary goal if I knew it could be de-scored. It is already strategically questionable to stack on it, and with descoring it would lose all functionality other than annoying teams who have to drive around it.
It’s absolutely horrible right now. The advantage that the red alliance gets in being able to respond to the opponents’ placement is massive. I do like the trickery that can be involved in auton positioning and setup, but when all teams are being tricksy, it ultimately becomes a game of rock, paper, scissors with teams guessing what their opponents will do. This introduces an element of luck that I believe should not be present. It also makes it harder to carry a match. For instance, if I am on blue in a qualification match, against a solid but noticeably inferior opponent (I have a better highest-scoring auton than them), this advantage can be nullified. How so? Imagine that my partner has no autonomous, and their partner has a charge autonomous. They can place their partner across from me, while they run a 20-point zone auton. I can no longer run my 20-point zone auton if I predict this, so I would instead be forced to score on the stationary goal. Or if I don’t see this coming, my auton will simply be disrupted. Or, even if my partner has a charge autonomous, then no one gets the autonomous bonus, even if I have better programming. Regardless, I lose the autonomous bonus regardless of what amazing routine I spent hours and hours perfecting. (I only got to use my two cones on a mobile goal in the twenty point zone autonomous a couple of times at State…). Even if this does not affect the match (which it certainly can, especially if I am being defended the whole time while my partner does basically nothing), the autonomous bonus is very important in rankings.
ITZ is ok in my opinion. I liked the idea of star struck better, but the robots this year are better than last year. In star Struck, it was a lot of building claws where as this year even though you see a lot of DR4B, there is still more variety than last year. I would have liked this game more if they did some redesigning to add a defensive element to the game that isn’t so vague.
Honestly couldn’t have said it better myself
Will the GDC be making any changes to the field before worlds? If they do when will they announce this?
If they do make a change, it’ll most likely be an addition of cones on the field. If they do plan to make a change, I’m not sure when they may announcing it.
Having involved in vex since elevation, I wouldn’t list ITZ as the best vex game of all time.
Gateway and Roundup would still rank higher.
But ITZ is pretty good. Just that it lacked a few key ingredient, eg. Lack of a last few seconds game changer, etc. Gateway had the doubler and negator, while roundup had the hanging. ITZ has… nothing.
And ITZ does feels a bit like a game that was not given enough thoughts, eg. The changing of dimension from 48” to 36”… seriously, they didn’t think that we will just built a wallbot and park there?!
And how abt how robots will just disrupt the other alliance autonomous routine? You would have thought that they should have learnt from what happened in Roundup… sigh…
But personally, I thought this year it has been too restrictive towards defensive robots. And honestly, if anyone looked back at the previous Seasons, the defensive plays and defensive robots were the ones that reduced design convergence.
This game has been much better than the recent vex games. Keep in mind this is only my first year in vex. I have, however, watched previous games even though I don’t have the firsthand experience. One major issue is the score balancing. The value of mogos compared to cones is much more, especially when comparing the difficulty to score each. A better approach for the score balancing would have been to have 10, 5, and 2 point zones. While this seems to devalue the scoring of mogos, a 10 point high stack bonus would put the focus more on stacking higher than defensive mogo only robots. I also agree that the mogo position should be changed and the ram autonomous should be disallowed to make programming more important. There are also a few minor issues such as the state of the game in skills and loader pushing. All these criticisms aside, I have learned a lot during my first year in vex and have had a lot of fun. I hope the game design committee realizes their mistakes from this year and makes even better games in the future.
P.S. The games before nbn and starstruck seemed to be really good.
I’m sure you meant to write “Elevation and Toss Up (except for the beach ball failures).” 
I think it isn’t very beginner friendly, but it’s still fun.
Yes. Very bad for new teams like NBN. Starstruck was a super good game for new teams, hopefully next game will have less subsystems
Imagine nbn on a star struck field. Balls have sand in them to minimize bouncing.
This year is my least favorite and I’ve been here since the end of Toss Up I personally found this year a significant decrease of the small schools in SD this year. My guess is they said that the 4 lb mogo were going to be too expensive to lift up Because of the strain on the motors. My school orders typically 4 new motors per bot per team and we bought at least another 6 motors than usual, plus we had a controller and cortex needing to be replaced but as we only had 2 bots this year we took the cortex from the bot that was gaining dust but we didn’t want to buy a new one when we knew V5 was coming before the exchange program was announced