Prizes- I like the losers buying the winners dinner. This isn't for profit, this is for fun. Maybe making the losers do something humiliating like.... lip synching to Britney Spears and putting it on Youtube, but really, this is more about the fun of the event and the spirit of the competition. Side bets can be made at the discretion of teams on an event by event basis, but the season winner is where the real prize gets handed out. I figure this wouldn't be totally hashed out until we had teams and the teams agreed on the terms, because some people may not be ok with buying other people dinner due to financial commitment or whatever. But yeah, the winners get something for sure, even if I have to buy em a pizza or something. Ain't no fun if the homies can't have none after all.
Bonus Box- I like this. Since most of the contraptions are going to be sketchy at BEST, I think the idea of recycling a certain portion of them could be beneficial to everyone involved. I think I wanna change my mind on the stipulation of it though, and not allow anything to be chosen from it until AFTER shopping. I think while it will be an advantage to the winning team, letting them at it before hand could really screw the losing team, as it would give that much more advantage to the winners. We could also throw out the winner/loser stipulation altogether, and leave it to a coin toss.... because even if one team only gets one part each time, if it's the same team every time, they're gonna know what is in X machine built, and know right away what they want out of it, as soon as the challenge is announced.
Scoring- seems to me other than direct battles, quantifiable end goal is a pretty easy task. Race across petes pool, fastest time wins. Climb a hill, fastest time wins. Throw a ball, distance wins. So in that end, sliding scale works. We could pretty easily just base it on that, though I like the idea of having bonus points just because moar because moar. No idea how that would work, and we'd have to leave that to the judges, and promise not to be all sour about it if we think we got screwed.
Season-
Consistent teams should be fairly easy to do, though I am wary of team stacking. I think if we were to do that, we should still pick names out of a hat, or at least name captains, or hold nominations for captains, or whatever. I honestly don't want to be a captain, because I hate choosing out of a line, and already know who I'd choose out of the list of players above. That's not fair to everyone else. Maybe we can do it election style, with the judges picking the captains out of the available nominees. I figure James and Pete and Adrian to be fairly good judges of character, and they can probably do themselves well in evening the odds by picking captains, or maybe even the entire team right out of the box. I'd be ok with that.
Times- I'm leaning towards one hour of shopping once in the door at Goodwill, and then 4 hours of build time. No advantage for being done early, other than you can test and tune as needed. We might want to try and rig something up like a tarp or a curtain so that the teams aren't trying to steal ideas from each other.
Tools. Duct tape needs to be added to tools. Duct tape is going to be essential, I can feel it. Also, one amendment to the hardware rule- I figure if you bought it at Goodwill and are counting it in the budget, you can use it for whatever you want. So if I managed to find lag bolts and the associated washers and whatnot, and paid for them out of my machinery budget, and proved so to the judges, we might as well allow that to be an integral part of the machine. Now if I got said lag bolts at HD/Lowes, I best not be using them other than to whole the whole thing together, albiet likely very minimally at best.
