Just wondering, what is the worst thing that happened to you during a competition? Mine was that we made it to finals just to find that our ally doesn’t have a functioning robot.
Our second alliance was a team whose bot fell apart just because they “took out an axle.” They just had the brain on a couple pieces and said they would cheer us on.
We got 0 points because our cactus fell over 
For me it’s white screening in the middle of a match.
A team in semis at a local drove across the field as soon as auto ended and hit our battery so hard that it turned off. Our robot had much more consistent scoring than either of the robots on the other alliance, but our partner was a hero bot and couldn’t score. We lost 6-11 from a goal in the negative corner and auto win. That was the only local that we didn’t make finals.
Our teams battery clip broke mid match and the other teams alliance (on accident) drove over it and the battery is now gone (it got destroyed)
My wheel fell off in skills since the holes were teardropping (this is in IQ). Also, my 4-bar disintergrated by launching all 8 pins out of the holes since my robot dislikes living. (It was built using Vex’s Linq build instrustions. Now that I think about that, can you use the other robots vex made instructions for, or only the current year’s hero bot?)
You can use any of the “VEX Published” plans…but unless you’re a novice team, why wouldn’t you use the engineering design process instead? Robots with training wheels (herobots) are for beginners.
I think you can use older hero robot builds, not against any rules or anything.
I could’nt remember if the rule stated that only the current hero bot was allowed as build instruction. I needed it for my first year, but I havent needed it since. I was curious since I’ve seen so many claw bots and robots with little to no modification from the older instructions.
we got paired up with a team who built the slowest and clunkiest bot imaginable (and it couldn’t even score!) also, a terrible photo was taken of me while i was Locked In (my mouth was open and i looked absolutely braindead) and lives on in the 2024-25 yearbook forever, or until all of the copies are destroyed
Our robot claw and our numatics broke off. 
Tour brain (first gen at the time) claimed it could not connect to a controller or smth like that and it was last year and was so difficult:(
One of our sister teams built their drivetrain with so much friction, that they had to go outside, while it was snowing, to cool of the motors. They just put a coat over it to prevent snow from messing it up even more
Not the worst thing that could happen to the motors…
our teammates got in trouble for stealing it was a grand ol time😭
During qualifications we just so happened to be paired with 3 separate teams that couldnt stack pins. One of them could grab starting pins, but that was all the bot could do 
They could grab the starting pins, but not stack them? Did they knock them off?
Hey! Coder here (story from previous year on a different team entirely). We had gotten to elims and our team was super hype (this was the comp right before states and we weren’t qualified yet, so there was alot riding on this). The match prior to alliance selection, the opposing team called an illegal size check. Our team wasn’t worried as we had been checked in, obviously. Turns out, we were- get this- a little less than a quarter of an inch over the size limt.
breath… yes im serious.
yep. we had to rapidly destruct our entire bot to fix this issue. We got it in size limit barely and started our match, which we we won, granting us access to elims. We went round one against the team that ended up wining, which, to be honest, we could have played better, but we would have done much better if the illegal size check wasn’t called. 
one of our alliances controller ran out of battery during finals and we got only 97 points