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The Rotator team might have a point about weapons being a requirement to compete, but there shouldn't be a requirement that the winning robot uses its weapon. If Beta's hammer had been taken out in the first few seconds of the fight, or had malfunctioned, it shouldn't be instantly disqualified from winning. I don't see that making a (likely correct) strategic decision not to use the hammer except in specific circumstances is somehow worse than having the weapon simply fail to function. Beta's built around that hammer, and spends plenty of weight on it which could have been used on the wedge or other parts of the robot, so it isn't like they're cheating the system. If anything, they're operating at a disadvantage given the history of hammerbots in the tournament. That they had no solution either for the wedge or for the superior pushing power Beta demonstrated indicates that the judges were right to decide the fight in Beta's favor: sticking with Rotator's lower blade would have increased the odds of effective weapon damage to both bots, but nobody is suggesting that that choice should disqualify the Rotator team.
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Dec 19, 2020 00:52
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Borsche69 posted:Yeah, I don't think they really need to gently caress with the rules so much as they need to get the judges on the same page as to what the rules mean. It's one thing if it's a really close fight and the judges just have differing opinions on who won, it's another thing if they disagree on who won because they have different understandings of the rules. The rules are pretty clear: 1. Never using a functional weapon disqualifies that robot from receiving "all" the Aggression points. So no 3-0 if you never use a weapon. That means 2-1 is a valid score for such a robot. 2. Ramming counts toward Aggression, it just counts less than weapon usage. How do you score a match where one robot constantly rams the other while refusing to use its weapon, while the other robot attacks less frequently and without much obvious efficacy, spending a fair amount of time evading instead? It could be 2-1, or 1-2; I don't see scoring it 0-3 and you can't score 3-0. If the rules precluded judges exercising judgment on choosing between 2-1 and 1-2, why have judges at all? You can disagree with their judgment, but you can't say that the rules precluded it.
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Dec 29, 2020 20:48
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Witch Doctor used to break down all the time; despite their weapon troubles, I'm impressed by their ability to keep operating in the fight against Hydra. Old school WD would have been KOed. I'm of two minds about the Hydra/Huge situation. Huge works because the bots it fights can't necessarily be reconfigured to make their weapons effective against it, and if somebody designed a bot just to beat Huge it would get rolled by the rest of the field. And at least in their initial appearance on the show, they really didn't have an effective weapon, they were a rope-a-dope bot. Hydra had a cheap solution to the fight; if the alternative is to force ingenuity, that's one thing, but if it's to give a big advantage to the teams with enough cash to completely reweapon their bots for a single fight, that's another. And how much weapon activity is "enough?" Would Hydra have been OK if they'd put a spike on the end of the arm? What if they put an extender on their flipper and only used it once? Would putting a wedge on a bot and slamming into Huge be acceptable, but what Hydra did is not, and if so, what's the difference? Hydra clearly had all the control in that fight, and almost kept Huge from using its weapon at all: you can't penalize that as a general principle without essentially writing off bots which use more defensive options, or grab-bots. In the end, I think Huge has a huge weakness, in that it's helpless in any situation that requires pushing or traction, and that's where it found itself. At the same time, Hydra's solution to their weapon essentially being neutralized by Huge's design doesn't seem especially satisfying as a viewer. Changing the rules in a way that benefits a particular build or design does seem like something that shouldn't be done lightly, though. My impression of the current Chomp is that it's a nasty weapon delivery system, but so slow that it simply can't be expected to fight other robots except that the rules of the game require the other robots to keep closing and attacking. Is that good design? Or at least, an experiment that's good for the game? Or is it exploiting the rules in the same way Hydra did, but with more entertaining results?
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Jan 8, 2021 18:52
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Great Beer posted:Blacksmith was a great jobber though. It took a pounding, lasted a good bit into the fight, sent fire everywhere, and gave the appearance of fighting back. Blacksmith is the Duck of hammerbots.
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Jan 17, 2021 01:02
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Fish Of Doom posted:I think Ray Billings has also said that he's going to give Tombstone to his son to drive and probably build a vertical spinner, so that's a bummer. Given that he said in the AMA linked earlier in the thread that he's sticking with Tombstone, I'd want to know your source for that.
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Mar 17, 2021 18:36
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