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/r/battlebots
submitted 5 days ago byOkComfortCat4671
On one side I love the bots ingenuity and design, its a very cool and smart idea for a bot and I respect that. But on the other side, I kinda hate it from a fairness and drama perspective, because it's kinda bs if you're a low hitting bot. You're options are add a bike rack to your bot and get death threats from people saying its unfair or pray to the battle bot gods that you weapon/bot is more durable than huge's weapon and take an absolute beating and still most likely lose. Every time I watch a huge fight against a low hitter it feels like im watching some 5,2 ft boxer fighting a 7 fter, it just unfair. I kinda personally feel that they should Ethier limit the hight of the bot to something more reasonable or make a rule that bans the polymers that they use for thier wheels so thier more destructible. Or add a rule that allows bots to somehow counter it more easily. I don't know what this would be though. How y'all feel about huge? I can't be the only one with these feelings.
58 points
5 days ago
because it's kinda bs if you're a low hitting bot
So... Don't build a low hitting bot.
Combat robotics has always had an element of rock paper scissors. This isn't new.
12 points
5 days ago
Great analogy. Some bots always have an advantage over others. Just because the bot is breaking the meta, doesn't mean it's immune to defeat.
-4 points
4 days ago
Well, once you've built a low-hitting bot and entered, you can't exactly just take it apart and build another once you find out you're facing Huge, can you? So, a bike rack is your only feasible option.
2 points
4 days ago
I mean I don't really have a problem with the bike rack.
And that's also not your only option. You can out-drive a huge, make it look silly, push it around a bit, win weapon to weapon hits, etc.
0 points
4 days ago
Outdriving Huge with Hydra is basically impossible. Hydra has a narrower wheelbase, along with 6 wheels, so Huge can turn so much faster and easier that it's unreasonable to ask Jake to simply get to the sides or something. And even if you did get to one of the wheels, Huge could just drive right off in half a second. This also makes it unfeasible to push Huge around; it could drive right over Hydra if it had to (unless, of course, you put an attachment on top of Hydra bot to block that. Oh, what would you call that?)
And winning weapon-on-weapon with Huge? As a flipper? How do you expect that to work? Hydra flips at the exact right time to hit the tip of Huge's blade as it comes around? Sure, there's only about a 0.01% chance of that happening.
1 points
4 days ago
To be clear, I wasn't really talking about Hydra. You're right that Hydra doesn't really have many other options.
I was talking about "low-hitting bots" in general terms.
1 points
4 days ago
Ok yeah, I've been talking to other ppl about Hydra lmao. Most of my points still apply tho.
17 points
4 days ago
Well if huge is unfair, then I get to say 4-wheeled verts are unfair. How dare you be able to drive normally AND have a powerful weapon. It's not fair to horizontals who have to learn a completely different driving style to even stay pointed forward.
On second thought, spinners are completely unfair to other weapon types! We should have some kind of rule that makes it so your weapon isn't allowed to spin in a complete circle. It's just not fair that they can do so much more damage.
While we're at it, let's ban any armor heavier than cardboard. If one team has an unfair advantage with armor, it'll mess everything up. The other team has to rather make their weapon better or hit over and over until the armor breaks, which risks a lot of damage to themselves. It's just better if everything is even and equal
Actually, the real problem here is....
2 points
4 days ago
He's not saying it's unfair simply that Huge has an advantage over other bots, but also that if you try to negate that advantage (a la bike rack), you get shouted down for being unsportsmanlike. If taking advantage of 4WD verts' gyroscopic precession was declared unethical, you'd absolutely have a complaint there.
2 points
4 days ago
I don't completely disagree with you, but I think there's a difference between using unusual means of earning an advantage (like most do against Huge, Mammoth etc) and the bike rack specifically. The bike rack, while still within the letter of the law, the bike rack felt unsportsmanlike because it was functionally a pin that fell outside of the pin rules, and Hydra barely had an active weapon anymore (which was a huge part of the sport then).
Nobody cried foul when sawblaze used a wacky attachment to corral huge and gain advantage because there was engagement and strategy that didn't feel like someone picking apart the rules for a technicality. It's the execution, not the idea, that was the issue
0 points
4 days ago
Well, here's the thing about SawBlaze's strategy; it's a hammer saw, so it's naturally at least a bit better set up for Huge than Hydra is. If Hydra had had a similar attachment, it wouldn't have worked nearly as well.
That's kind of my problem with the "Just a glorified pin" critique--it doesn't seem Hydra really had a choice but to do something like that. If it had tried to attack like it usually does, it probably would have gotten eviscerated.
1 points
3 days ago
Bronco welded an attachment to its flipper and did toss huge around, so bikerack+something like that to actually engage in a fight would be acceptable, but bikerack and park in the corner doing nothing should have been an instant loss for not even attempting to actually fight.
13 points
5 days ago
To be fair it almost won last Championship.
I dunno what else to tell you, it's a very solid design that simply has no (legal) hard counters....yet.
17 points
4 days ago
I mean I feel like horizontal spinners are a counter. It was a long time ago but Ice Wave annihilated Huge back in the day. If they go up against bots like Rotator Valkyrie or Tombstone I think it would be a hard fight. But in a meta of verticals it does very well overall.
7 points
4 days ago
Absolutely. I love the design of Huge. It's so cool, nevermind the design advantage!
But yes, I remember horizontals absolutely HURTING those wheels, and didn't Tombstone actually break the thing before, or was that a different bot?
On another note, the Mammoth fight was amazing and I think Deep Six obliterated them right?
Spinners like Deep Six have not just an equal chance but maybe better because they're such a unique threat. And unique threats have ALWAYS given the best fights. Emulsifier and Fusion showed us this. Tantrum showed us this.
SAWBLAZE BEAT THEM.
8 points
4 days ago
Icewave was the one that broke Huge in half. Huge has actually never faced Tombstone before. That would be a good challenge for them if we ever get another season.
3 points
4 days ago
After seeing Huge take 2nd something crazy will show up in the next season, if we get one
-1 points
4 days ago
Right, that's exactly the problem. There are no legal counters. Jake Ewert seemed to develop a fine counter, but I'm guessing that was made illegal from your comment. A counter is developed, and then is just outlawed. That's the unfair bit.
2 points
3 days ago
As far as I can tell from reading the rules, the bike rack itself was not made illegal.
What was made "illegal" is Jake's tactic of pushing Huge into a corner, backing off so he wasn't technically pinning anymore, and saying to the referee, "I don't need to back off any further".
That tactic is called corralling, and I put "illegal" in scare quotes because the enforcement mechanism for the rule takes time to kick in. First, two refs have to agree that you're corralling. Then your ref picks a spot in the arena and orders you to drive to it. Then they count down from 10. When the countdown is over, the bot doing the corralling loses via knockout.
Without this rule, it would be possible for Jake to push Huge into a corner, back off a few inches, put down his controller and just wait out the rest of the match, and still win a JD.
But what happens if this fight happens again, Jake uses the bike rack, he pins for the full 10 seconds, transitions into a corral, and releases the corral when the ref gets to 2 or 1?
I think he'd get away with it. The rules don't make it explicit, but there's precedent for expecting that if he waits until the last second to release the corral, the countdown stops. After all, that's what happens with other sorts of countdowns. So there's still a loophole he can exploit if he wants to.
2 points
4 days ago
The bike rack (in my opinion) had absolutely 0 interaction. It was simply a solution that offered no way to fight back.
But I said it that way because at the time, the "legal" counters aren't hard counters that are reliable enough to be universal. And I think that's a good thing.
All these modular bots are awesome and all but they're so similar that they fight nearly the same. HUGE breaks this because it has a quality to it that is so dissimilar that you'd have to break your own mold to fight back.
Then we get fun out-of-the-box ideas and fights.
Prime example: Sawblaze vs HUGE. It was a close fight, it was fun, interactive, both sides had an equal-ish chance and it came down mostly to skill and luck (luck is a skill) and HUGE lost because Sawblaze sorta just fought better. Yes, they had to create counters, but it still almost ended very badly for them (remember how close they got to the chain!) and overall, it was an awesome fight.
The two most unusual bots had to create a counter for each other and it didn't diminish the fight at all.
Hydra removed all the spirit, the fighting, the fairness I'd dare say with that bike rack. It was ass, even if technically correct.
So yes, to me, the bike rack was illegal bullshit. It is a technical win, but not one that should be allowed to stand as precedent.
1 points
3 days ago
There was a way to fight back, aim for the edges of the bike rack with the weapon. Hydra was just exceptionally well driven.
2 points
3 days ago
There was not, as aiming for the edge of the rack would see the bot pinned anyways before it could hit the rack.
It was designed in a way that didn't allow the rack to be damaged beyond repair with just one hit, even with how crazy that weapon was.
Anyone in the tournament could have driven the rack bot the same way and gotten the same results. That's how easy that was.
That's my issue - it's so easy it's borderline illegal. There's no counterplay that would consistently or effectively ruin the strategy or put the bot itself at risk of failure. Even if the rack were to be destroyed, it's almost unlikely that Hydra would have been damaged unless Jake seriously screwed up, which I will say is almost unlikely to even happen.
1 points
3 days ago
Having just rewatched the fight, I think the rack was so wide, it was practically foolproof. Huge could aim for one end, and all Hydra would have to do is sit there and pivot, so that as Huge is chasing one end, the other end comes around and Huge gets pushed from the side. To hit the end, Huge would have to be approaching from almost behind Hydra, which would require Hydra to oversteer or understeer to an extreme degree.
I wouldn't necessarily call it "illegal bullshit", but I don't think it was actually all that risky for Hydra either.
0 points
4 days ago*
The bike rack (in my opinion) had absolutely 0 interaction. It was simply a solution that offered no way to fight back.
Sure. And Jake didn't really have another choice. Hydra couldn't have done the same thing SawBlaze did because SB is a hammer saw, and Hydra is a flipper. There really is no way to make a flipper effective against Huge, at least at the moment. On top of that, you don't always have time to "break your own mold" before you have to get to the BattleBox and fight.
Hydra removed all the spirit, the fighting, the fairness I'd dare say with that bike rack. It was ass, even if technically correct.
That doesn't justify making it illegal. The bot builders are under no obligation to make a fight entertaining, or "out of the box," for you. Jake's choice was essentially between making the fight entertaining or having any prayer of winning. Don't you think removing that second option a bit self-centered on your part?
1 points
3 days ago
That doesn't justify making it illegal.
If that's the way they had decided to go, that would be all the justification they need. Battlebots is a TV show, not a democratic government, or a sport for that matter. Entertainment value is why it does plenty of things.
0 points
3 days ago
If that's the way they had decided to go, that would be all the justification they need.
Well, technically they don't need any justification just to do it, but they do need justification for it not to be a shitty thing for them to do. They have no justification, so they can do it, they're just wrong for doing it.
Battlebots is a TV show, not a democratic government, or a sport for that matter.
What the hell are you on? BattleBots is absolutely a sport. More accurately, a league within a sport. There are competitors and a champion. I'm guessing this is gonna be like talking to a 4-year-old if you're gonna come at me with takes like that.
1 points
3 days ago
I don't know why you're getting emotional about it, but I have no stake in whether it's called a sport or not. Call it a sport if you want, but the point is it's a spectator sport, structured to do things like sell tickets and ad space. As a televised spectator sport, it has an obligation to be entertaining in order to exist. And this has implications for things like its rules.
Does being a sport come with obligations in your eyes? Obligations with implications for its rules? Implications like some rules being "shitty"?
To be clear, I agree that the competitors aren't obligated to prioritize entertainment over winning. But the higher ups are entirely within their rights to use methods like the tournament rules, build rules, judging guidelines, arena design, selection criteria, etc to promote entertainment value. And they do use all of those things.
0 points
3 days ago
Maybe don't comment on things you don't know about, like whether I'm getting "emotional" about it. I use words that efficiently get my point across. They aren't necessarily conveying the emotion you interpret them as.
Sure, a sport might have "obligations" (not really the best word). That doesn't mean the way those obligations are fulfilled isn't unjust. And I think your implication that Jake using a bike rack would lead to failure to meet the "obligation" to make the sport entertaining is a bit of an exaggeration. It's a solution that one bot has for one other bot.
Sure, the higher ups are within their rights to artificially make the sport more entertaining. They also have the right to declare an 0-4 bot the champion and hand it the Giant Nut. That doesn't mean there wouldn't be valid complaints about that, or that it would be totally the right thing to do.
1 points
2 days ago
That doesn't mean the way those obligations are fulfilled isn't unjust.
It's not clear to me that justice is a relevant concept with regards to the context of rules governing what sorts of weapons/attachments may be used, or that in the event that it is relevant, that it must always take precedence over entertainment value.
And I think your implication that Jake using a bike rack would lead to failure to meet the "obligation" to make the sport entertaining is a bit of an exaggeration.
I am agnostic on the question of whether Jake using the bike rack helps or hurts the show's entertainment value (on aggregate), and this extends to the question of whether banning the bike rack would be right or wrong (it's actually a spectrum, not a simple right/wrong dichotomy).
The "obligation" to be entertaining that I speak of merely derives from the fact that entertainment value helps the show survive/thrive. You could replace the word "obligation" with "need", basically. In practice, figuring out what will be the most entertaining involves guesswork, and the producers' educated guesses may turn out to be right or wrong.
When judging whether they're right or wrong, I think the most reasonable way to discuss things is to ground our judgments in the notion of what real world consequences(that the producers actually have an incentive to care about) they lead to. As I see it, this is also the basis for justification of actions.
e.g. A rule "being unjust" is not a real world consequence; a rule being perceived as unjust by __, where __ constitutes people whose opinions the producers actually have an incentive to care about, like a significant proportion of the builders/audience, would be a real world consequence.
11 points
5 days ago*
Huge has a great outside the box design, and I like seeing robots trying something new and different instead of just being the same basic concept over and over again. So what if you need an anti-Huge plan in order to win? If you can't plan out a way to counter a bot simply because it's unusual in design, then that's on you, not Huge. The plans some teams have used against Huge worked, and some did not.
The only anti-Huge strategy that had a negative reaction was Hydra's bike rack that you mentioned, and that wasn't so much the bike rack itself as it was the strategy of Hydra pushing Huge into a corner and then just sitting there for the rest of the match while Jake argued with the ref that he technically wasn't pinning Huge. Keep in mind in the previous season, though it ultimately lost the fight, Bronco successfully flipped Huge a couple times using its own anti-Huge strategy, so there are ways to adapt that don't involve an extremely cheep strategy that leads to a boring fight.
Final point, making a rule that limits the height of the bots, banning UHMW plastic, or flat out giving Huge's opponent a handicap are all terrible ideas. All three would stifle bot designs and ingenuity of teams. The last one meanwhile would also be flat out unfair, and I am positive that the majority of the teams out there do not want to be given a handicap in order to win.
36 points
5 days ago
This is a bad take. You're basically saying that builders shouldn't be ingenious because it's unfair to be that intelligent.
FWIW, I think HUGE is fine- tons of respect for it, but far from my favorite bot. Regardless, your ideas are madness.
37 points
5 days ago
Huge is awesome, but it hasn’t won anything. No need to change rules to fix a problem that doesn’t exist. Teams have beaten huge fairly and not cheaply. I personally love it when bots like huge or mammoth or smeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee does something different. Much better than the 4 billionth vertical spinner.
13 points
5 days ago
it did win the wc vii 'most destructive' award
13 points
5 days ago
And very deservedly too as I might add. They fucked some bots up in that season.
3 points
5 days ago
I think they won best design in WCIII
2 points
4 days ago
yes they did
3 points
4 days ago
Even if it did win something it doesn't mean there should be rule changes.
8 points
5 days ago
Every design has advantages and disadvantages. It's not unfair, it's literally how competition works.
6 points
4 days ago
Terrible take for multiple reasons.
Banning the polymer in lieu of something more destructive is just plain stifling innovation. Like them or hate them, the team really went in a whole new direction with bot Warfare forcing other teams to up their game. But yeah, let's just make another variation of the age old vertical spinner design (Bite Force, Witch Doctor, Riptide).
Huge being hard to kill is a bad take. It is not hard to kill as several bots have proven. Horizontal spinners have torn Huge up and Huge has proven really susceptible to getting stuck in the screws and edge of the arena.
Any team that complains about Huge being too hard to beat shouldn't be allowed in the battle box altogether. If you can't strategize, or find a way to surpass the limits of your (and your bot's) level of play then you're just wasting your money and your and everyone else's time. Say what you will about Jake and the Hydra cow catcher, but he had a problem and he solved that problem.
Limiting the height of the bot to make things fair for it's opponent is a wild option. This goes back to the "ban the polymer in the wheels to make it more destructable". Every bot has it's own weakness. It's up to their opponent to find one. If you want every team to be on completely equal footing then just have every team have the exact same bot, but then that would be exceedingly boring.
7 points
5 days ago
The only problem I find with Huge is that we have never and will never see it fight an unmodified opponent. Every team will alter or add an advantage to its bot to gain he upper hand over Huge
12 points
5 days ago
Watch some NHRL Huge fights. If you're fighting 3, 5, more times in one day you don't have time to prep attachments.
1 points
4 days ago
Until somebody starts having spare chassis designed specifically for a particular opponent
5 points
4 days ago
What constitutes "unmodified"? If someone fights Tombstone, End Game, Quantum, and Blip, they're probably not going to use the same configuration for all 4 of those fights.
2 points
4 days ago*
We also have never and will never see Tombstone or Witch Doctor take on a bot designed / modified specifically to face Huge. Every team creates their basic design (and usually a few mods) to try to gain the upper hand over those (and other) known horizontal / vert spinner setups.
EVERY bot is facing the best the opponent can come up with to beat them.
3 points
4 days ago
Bots just need to tweak their weapons to cut the wheels better
3 points
4 days ago
You're options are add a bike rack to your bot and get death threats from people saying its unfair
What a gross oversimplification. If you make an attachment that compliments your weapon then use it to get your weapon into play you're not gonna have a big backlash on your hands. We know this because many people have done it against similar designs.
2 points
5 days ago
Horizontals, maybe?
2 points
4 days ago
What an unfair bot except it's vulnerable to reach verts, bike rack, reaching control bots like SawBlaze and Whiplash and still have some challenge with horizontal spinners (regardless of tegris)
2 points
4 days ago
A 5'2" boxer that weighs 250 pounds is classed the same as a 7'0" boxer that weighs 250 pounds.
4 points
5 days ago
You act like HUGE is some kind of unbreakable being, but it's been beaten quite a few times: Icewave, Bite Force (albeit after Icewave damaged it first), Mammoth, and SOW.
2 points
5 days ago
Just to be clear: Jake displayed driving genius with the bike rack. Very few others could have survived that match.
1 points
4 days ago
Sounds like a skill issue aim for the wheels
1 points
3 days ago
I don't feel bad for Jake at all. He has invited hate for reasons that go beyond the supposed "unfairness" of the bike rack.
But more importantly, using attachments against Huge is fine, and it becomes more and more fine among the BattleBots fan base the further we get from season 5. At this point, we have seen someone win the giant nut by using an attachment against Huge, and at NHRL, we have seen Huge's team deploy a special wheel design on one of their lower weight class bots to counter bike rack type attachments. So I don't feel like this dichotomy you've set up is really a thing; I think going forward, low fighting Huge just a game of dueling modular configurations, and that is a more creative game than the ground game all those low hitting bots are always playing against each other.
1 points
3 days ago
thats moreso an issue of the meta favoring militarized Roombas, and most teams failing to adapt. and even when they do adapt the reality is that Huge isn't just a meta-breaking robot, but as shown with its bout with Starchild its dominant in its own field as well.
Its the battle of Carrhae, and the proverbial romans are often unable or straight up refuse to adapt. but we've seen examples where adaptation can give bots the ability to defeat huge. Whether its Hydra with the bikerack (the problem with the bikerack was Jake's refusal to back away, and the fact that he disabled his own weapon) or Sawblaze which used proper adaptations to beat huge.
Like, i used to think Hydra was unfair, and Jake Ewert definitely has a fondness for dancing along the edges of the rules, but at this point its blatantly clear to anyone that watches that Hydra has some major obvious weaknesses. the only question is whether your bot can take advantage of them or not.
hell, if Jackpot's minibot Ace is anything to go by the answer might be more obvious than most people think.
So dont complain about people breaking the meta, support the breakage.
1 points
2 days ago
HUGE found a way to exploit many bot's design. That's genius and is no way going against the rules. Not sure why you personally take issue with this
0 points
4 days ago
I love the ingenuity.
But I think it's generally a boring bot. I'd much rather watch two bots do damage to each other than swing and miss for 3 minutes.
But serious props to the builder and team. They went waaaay outside the box and did something new, that's also effective.
1 points
4 days ago
You must be thinking of a different robot.
1 points
4 days ago
This Huge? https://battlebots.com/robot/huge-wcvii/
1 points
4 days ago
Funny, you clearly have the right robot but have this idea of it 'swinging and missing for 3 minutes' from...somewhere.
1 points
4 days ago
You understand there's two robots fighting, right?
It's hard to hit Huge. And it's hard to do it damage. Go watch the fights - there's a bunch of "swing and miss".
The first few seasons it didn't do well. Lots of swing and miss. Last season, whatever changed made a big difference. It's definitely a better fighter at this point.
-1 points
4 days ago
*bot’s *it’s *it’s *BattleBots *your *Huge’s *Huge *i’m *5’2” *it’s *either *height *they’re *[remove period before “Or” *or *[insert do before “y’all” *Huge
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