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Yeah sorry, that was me being unnecessarily nitpicky .
I have been looking to see if an EDF overhead bar is plausible, just to try myself. Dunno if you can get one low profile enough to make it viable (on the plus side, if it's tall enough it could take out ALBOF's motor .
We've had weaponised EDFs too. Succulant and Kiwi for example.
Its not that I didn't understand your argument Scott, I just don't believe its that valid. Robot combat has a history of trends and crazes and they come about by designing to either copy or beat what was successful last time. The whole reason ALBOF came about, according to Andy, was he specifically designed a robot to beat Stanley. People are now specifically building robots to beat ALBOF. Once he's beaten, people will build to beat or try to emulate the new winner. That's just what happens isn't it? Building something specifically to counteract another successful design is nothing new. EDFs are nothing new, they've been in the competition longer than I've been doing it, with Vacuum, which was also once described as unbeatable by many. I also don't believe in a glorious level playing field in the sport where every robot has a tiny chance of beating whoever its up against. That is ideal but not possible in my opinion. So yes, I understand your points but no, I don't agree.
Also, additionally, I never thought you wanted to ban EDFs because you didn't like them, I think that's the way a lot of the rest of us would go, me included! If this went to a vote, all my fair play and moral fibres would say vote against it, but all my personal ones would say vote to ban them, and that WOULD just be because I hate them, because I cant see any other reason.
I feel the need to point out that Vacuum, Succulant, and any other robot that worked by evacuating a sealed chamber underneath the robot in order to gain downforce are massively different to those using an EDF. Vacuums have a specific, exploitable weakness that EDFs do not have, which is that if you break their seal the vacuum is useless. They are also negatively affected by arena floors that are uneven or have had damage done to them, which EDFs are not.
Anyway, I do understand where you're coming from. I personally dislike having a rock-paper-scissors metagame where people feel the need to build something specifically to beat what is currently successful, but I can understand that if that isn't something that you dislike, EDFs would not be the issue which I believe that they are. I'm more than happy to agree to disagree, but I felt the need to make the above post because multiple people (not you specifically) were saying things such as "well a spinner would beat it" which I felt was completely misunderstanding or ignoring the argument which I was trying to get across.
Maybe the "glorious level playing field", as you put it, is not possible, but in my eyes it's worth striving towards anyway. I probably get that PoV from competitive video games, as I've described before. That's always the angle I approach this sort of thing from. I can't say that it's unequivocally the "best" way or the "right" thing to do or direction in which we should be heading, but it's the style which I believe in most and prefer for anything competitive.
Thanks everyone for the responses, anyway. I would say opinion appears to be split around 50/50, which means the correct thing to do is almost certainly to leave things as they are at the moment.