My hopes for the new VRC Game

The next VRC game is due to be released in just a few hours. Although I don't plan to be involved at all next year, I still like to see a good year of competition, and a good game. Gateway has largely been a disappointment to me, and I'll be writing quite a bit about this at the conclusion of the VEX world championship. But anyways, my list of things I hope to see:

• A challenge where lifting objects to a great height is not the grand engineering challenge of the game! It's been a common theme in the past several years, and people are getting too good at it. I'm more than a little tired of parallel 6 bar lifts...
• A real emphasis on drivetrain design. VRC has never been played on anything but a flat field, and the congested fields as of late has limited the effectiveness of "zippy" designs. 
• On that topic. I doubt it'd ever happen, but I think that modern VRC robots have outgrown a 12x12 field. Six max dimension FRC robots with bumpers take up just over 3% of the floor area in their 27'x54' field. Four 18"x18" VEX robots take up 6.25% of their field, and most VRC games are much more relaxed on expanding robots. 
• Get rid of, or drastically limit, autonomous-human interaction. This has taken much of the challenge out of autonomous, and made the gateway programming skills challenge an absolute joke. I want to see another 1103...
• I don't mind human loading, but don't allow teams to rely completely on it. 
• A gamepiece we've never seen. Footballs in clean sweep were great, and made "scoop" style pickups viable and optimal for the first time since the very early early days of FRC. 
• An endgame. Rebound Rumble has reminded us all the power of an exciting endgame, and VRC needs to step up their game in this area. 
• A clear winner. I watch robotics. I love robotics. I live robotics. I know the rules the day the game comes out. And yet, the past two years of VRC, I've only had a vague idea of who was winning the match. Gateway and Round Up pulled the audience's head in several directions at once, and demanded fast mental math of us. VRC needs real time scoring. Even pseudo-real time scoring systems like in Logomotion or Lunacy made a world of difference for the audience. Or, do a fantastic visual game like clean sweep again. 
• Either overwhelm or underwhelm the robots with the size of the gamepiece, but don't go in between. I think two of VEX's best gamepieces come from its earlier days, in Quad Quandary and Hanging-A-Round. The small rings of quad quandary allowed for numerous ways to manipulate them. I saw claws, "flippers," roller systems in all orientations, the traditional dual tank tread lift, the "stackerbot," 1114's variant on the stackerbot, and many, many other systems. Many of these robots were masters of their art, manipulating these rings with great dexterity. It may have looked "easy," but I know from having built a robot for that year that it must have taken months of nonstop effort. And, the end result really impressed the audience, because the end result was a quality product.
  
  On the other side of the spectrum is the atlas ball. For those who weren't around back then, Hanging-A-Round had this gigantic, 30-something inch diameter ball on the field, which gave a bonus for having it on your side. Most teams just passively rolled it around, or ignored it. But there would be the odd team that went above and beyond, and made a crazy expanding system to trap this ball in a corner, pick it up, or even toss it out of the arena to negate it's bonus. They didn't do the job too cleanly. But it was clear to the untrained eye that it took a great feat of engineering to even attempt this incredible task. The same applies to green eggs lifting up the mobile goals in Round Up, it was unquestionably impressive.
  
  The past two games have been somewhere in the middle. The objects have been large enough to make it difficult, and to limit the number of ways to pick them up. They make the designers think at first. Eventually, some people get decent at it, and people follow, because it's challenging enough to limit the number of effective ways to do this (see "NZ designs" from gateway). But, to the untrained eye, the task still isn't spectacular enough to inspire the awe that the Atlas ball did. No one walking into an event thinks that picking up the barrels is the hardest thing in the world. And yet, I still haven't seen a single robot with the ability to pick up a barrel in an arbitrary orientation, shift it to a desirable one, and score it reliably. The "best" robots juggle these things around in their intakes. It is certainty harder to play gateway competently than it is quad quandary. But the average quad quandary robot looks much more effective and reliable, and ultimately more impressive. 
• Something that makes programming in autonomy during operator control highly desirable. 
• I doubt it will be evident when we see the game this evening. But I want the opportunity for a game breaker. Because who doesn't love to go "Why didn't I think of that?"
• A college challenge that demands two robots designed to work together. While I've made it clear I'm no big fan of gateway, I LOVE the twist the VRC GDC put on it for the college challenge. Here's hoping this trend continues.
• Bring back the optional separate robot for the programming skills challenge. 
• Minibots! Ok, maybe not...

And I'll close with something radical, that I think must be implemented in order to maintain VRC's credibility as a legitimate engineering challenge. 

A radical update to the game rules 6 months or further into the season, that requires teams to rethink things. 

I loved the year-long game when it was released. It has its advantages, particularly from an educational perspective, as teachers can use the game in their classrooms whenever it works for them. But from a competitive perspective, I'm beginning to wish VEX would go back to a defined "build season." Because a year has proven to be more than long enough to "figure out" a game. 

There have been a few ground-breaking innovations revealed on a large scale at world's every year. But those have been getting fewer and fewer each year. The first "NZ designs" hit VexForum before the summer was out, and the first six bar lift only took a few weeks. Elite were maxing out the Gateway field mere months after the curtain was raised. Even wallbots were in the public domain several months before, and the "super-stacker" was well-known going into worlds. In a competition that's about continuous improvement, with a platform that's versatile enough to allow low-risk complete rebuilds, eventually a point of diminishing returns is reached. Eventually, teams see something that they think is the best that can be done, and follow. The designs become stale, and winning becomes less and less about innovation. World's this year is filled with the same six bar+side roller design that was winning events 9 months ago. 

I want the teams that "figure it out" to have to prove themselves, and adapt to a changing game. A changing game is where matches are won and lost now...short of winning through superior design, the best teams now win through superior on-the-spot strategic decisions. I want to see VEX match this in their challenges, and match the truth of real world engineering, that your requirements are always changing. I want teams to be forced to adapt and improve, not only to better opponents, but to a living, growing game. 

This would be a difficult thing for VEX to do. FRC inadvertently did this to a couple teams this year, by closing a loophole regarding the definition of the bridge. The most well known team to have this happen to them was 3928. There was a lot of outrage towards this move by FRC at the time. How dare they change the challenge teams have worked so hard to solve?

But what did 3928 do? They adapted. They did a drastic, risky redesign of many aspects of their design, and came out better for it. They had a formidable robot at the midwest regional that was able to hold its own against some of the best teams in FIRST. 

This system wouldn't work as well in FRC, since it is very difficult to do anything other than "go with what you've got" in a six week build period. But to bring some added challenge into VEX, and force world championship caliber teams to work to improve, all year long.