AWS 47 - Stoke Sub Hampton - July 4th 2015

[Hogi]

thanks to Rory and the gang for another amazing event! well done to Andy for retaining the title and to everyone who came and competed. i hope to see you all soon at the next AWS. thanks again to everyone who made my day brilliant!

also: thanks to Joel and Owen for driving the other two penguind. you are both brilliant drivers and your turns will come to win.

[Occashokka]

Just not in the next decade!! :p (it's sad but true though)

[Rapidrory]

Thanks to everyone who came! We had 50 entrants in the main competition, almost exactly half that of AWS 46. This made for a (relatively) relaxed event with some great (and some weird) fights. The event went really well, though this was almost entirely down to Dave L who pretty much ran the event. Thank you so much Dave, things would likely have gone very wrong without your extensive help Also thanks to Pete for your new arena; made for some much more interesting fights.
Also, apologies to Ceri for missing some of your robots out of the draw; my laptop was struggling with antlog doing the draw and they got lost in the slightly mad panic to get it working again :S

As for my robots, Bad Idea and Slice went out in two straight fights as expected (EDIT: going back through the results, turns out Bad Idea did win a fight somehow!), taking out a few competitors in the process (Sorry Dave W!). BullyDozer and Why Wait did really well though, getting 5th and 4th, with Why Wait dealing a lot of damage with German efficiency on it's way. In the Fleas most of my team did terribly, except for the Hangover which was saved several times by Alex's driving of the undrivable Hangover Pt II. Lift-a-lot came second in the Nanos which was a surprise. Also, Bad Idea won the spinner annihilator, with a series of massive and lucky hits (For once the annihilator really lived up to it's name!). And Slice To Meet You won Dave's prize for the most innovative robot, which was great as Slice was going to be a boringly sensible robot until I remembered Dave was doing his award so decided to crazy it up a little

Attached is a screen capture of the results of the final 16; I may upload the rest of the fights when it's not close to midnight and desperately needing sleep :L

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

Its funny, I said to Gemma that it was nice to have a more relaxed event where I didn't have to do as much as usual, though apparently I "pretty much ran the whole thing"! :-p
You're very welcome anyway.

Also glad you appreciated the innovation award. This will be a running thing and I have a thread about it, so get thinking of crazy ideas. As Joey asked, they don't have to be that successful in combat to win, as long as its something I've not seen before.

[peterwaller]

Yes I agree this was a great event. Thanks to Rory and all the others who helped out on the day.
The fact there were less robots made it possible to have proper events in Fleas, Nanos, Annihilators, Tag and Roulette.
I didn't think I would ever be saying this but I believe we should think of ways to reduce the entry in some way (limiting to 2 rollers and 1 walker/cluster perhaps) to make AWS's more relaxed and varied.

[Remote-Controlled Dave]

First time I've ever enjoyed a nano comp. The melee format was great. Fleaweights certainly suffered from the people who had teams of 4, with Dan drawn up against himself so many times (kudos to him for fighting them all though!).

Without wanting to open up the debate here, I would worry about permanently reducing entries for people who have already invested a lot into making a team of 4 to suddenly have to lose one. I think this should probably remain at the EOs discretion, so they can announce a reduced number for teams if the event starts to seem too large.

Running the fleaweights as single elimination instead of double would have drastically shortened the day too. That comp seemed to go on forever.

[Rapidrory]

Yeah, I have to say the Nano melees worked really well in the larger nano arena; hopefully we'll have some more Nanos next time though

The rest of the results from the competition are here: http://imgur.com/a/61TnB

[Rapidrory]

Just a quick notice, I did have a donations box at the event but forgot to announce it so it was rather light at the end of the day. The venue was paid for by my dad and he's asking for the money to be returned which I don't have enough of; I'm about £100 short of repaying him at the moment. I know there weren't many people there, but if there was anyone there who didn't donate on the day, it would be great if you could donate something towards the cost of the venue via PayPal ( rapidrory@gmail.com). I may also have to up the suggested donation amount to £2 a robot as there was only 50 robots and the venue was £136 for the day. Sorry to be that guy, but I can't afford to not to be :/

[PanoramicHarry]

Thanks to Rory for a great AWS. Both photo album and video are now up.

https://www.facebook.com/15300407152643 ... gefilter=3

http://youtu.be/u-W3FAlRojk

[EpicentrE]

Thanks Harry! The speed at which you gets these up always impresses me.