I saw this post about the community’s thoughts on this year’s game, and I was wondering what people thought of last year’s game (High Stakes). Personally, I’ve been pretty vocal about how much I like pushback, but I feel like people are kinda split on how much they liked high stakes.
I didn’t like it. The possession limits were way too restrictive, Flex wheels were out of stock… thanks boys…, the rungs on the ladder were too high, the low one was too low, needed more rings, match loads would’ve been nice…
Although I did not compete in High Stakes, I did keep up with the season. I belive that it was a decent game, but I was hoping for descoring and high hangs to be more common. I feel like if there was 1 more month, these 2 would have been more prevelent.
@stromboli_499A
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High stakes was okay in my opinion. Although it wasn’t that “Beginner friendly” imo.
I personally thought that it was a good game, but I find push back to be better. There was a topic which had a poll and I’m pretty sure the median vote was either 7 or 8, so I assume most people found the game to be good. If you look up High Stakes you should be able to find it.
I thought it was a great game because of the fast paced high intensity game play. The stakes were pretty high that season. But I do think that they could have made the endgame easier. I really liked the balance since there were only 4 robots and 5 goals which made controlling them a lot more fun. Overall: 8.5/10
Definitely agree with this 
the possession limits didn’t really make sense
I relate to this so much lol. Before states, we spent the whole time experimenting with descoring and hangs just to realize they weren’t worth it. I don’t know about world’s, but at states hangs and descores barely made an impact as we predicted.
High Stakes was my first V5 game, and I agree the curve was definitely steeper than I thought it would be. If we had started with pushback, we might’ve built a better robot, but I wouldn’t have learned as many important quirks and mechs as I know now.
I think it’s this thread. Most people voted an 8 or 9, which is surprising. The early-season poll for pushback has a slightly lower rating, but it’s a small sample size and early season.
I can readily say that high hangs were crucial at worlds. The world champions high hung almost every match.
For me it was a very fun season, it was my first, but like a few others have said it was a somewhat challenging season to start with but I learned a lot from it, and actually did pretty well in my opinion.
I think the only “negative” of High Stakes was that since the learning curve was so high, a lot of the game’s elements (climbing, wall stakes) didn’t come into play until later on in the season, which can be viewed as positive in a way. I think Pushback is better (or worse based on how you think about it) in the fact that all of the elements of the game are already being interacted with.
I wasn’t a big fan, but that’s partially because of team drama making things more difficult than needed (half the things I built got “mysteriously” disassembled if I missed a single day).
Ignoring my own experience, I think it wasn’t very beginner friendly. In my opinion, the games should all have a way for a pushbot to score, just as an accessibility thing. Push Back does this with the lower middle goal, Over Under let pushbots score easily, and Spin Up had the low goal. In High Stakes, pushbots couldn’t score at all. It made the game more difficult for beginner teams and more discouraging for teams that struggled to get their scoring mechanism working.