03/15/2023
Hey everyone. We decided to wait before making this post as tensions were clearly high after Episode 10's release.
To start, yes, objectively, we hit Captain Shrederator more times than was necessary to knock their robot out. As fellow builders and competitors, we empathize with the financial and emotional strain that a last-minute rebuild can impose on a team, and we apologize to Brian Nave and the Captain Shrederator team for putting them through that. We strongly disagree with the idea that participation in a combat sport justifies the infliction of unnecessary damage, and no one within our sport should condone such behavior.
Unfortunately, however, fights are not experienced the same way by the audience and the teams involved in the fight. Teams don’t have access to the high-definition camera angles of the arena or the crystal-clear audio of the other team as the audience does, making it very difficult to make perfect, objective decisions during a fight.
Under the new knockout rules implemented for this season, we interpreted Captain Shrederator’s spinning as intent to continue the fight. We weren’t able to tell the extent of the damage they had taken and had no reason to look over at their team while their robot was moving, which is why we didn’t hear or respond to the brief comments made by their team during the match. We just had no idea they wanted to end the match until well after it was over. If we had recognized that they had sustained enough damage to warrant a count-out, or if the referees had started a count-out, or if Shrederator had stopped powering their weapon, we would’ve backed off.
Our primary objective in a fight is always to knock our opponent out by inflicting enough damage to stop them from moving. Our intent is not and has never been, to do the most damage possible during a fight. Our mentality as a team is to treat any active opponent as having knock-out capability, and we know that the difference between a win and a loss can be a split-second hesitation in a fight. However, this fight has also made us aware that with a heavy-hitting robot like ours, the difference between “just enough” and “too much” can hinge on an under 10-second lapse in judgment. We are committed to being more mindful of the damage we do in our fights moving forward.
