User blog:CrashBash/Top Five Good Robots with Bad Departures

The main goal of any competitor in a Robot Combat event, be it in the UK, USA, China or wherever else events may be held in this day and age, is obviously to win. Of course there are some teams who just enter to have a little fun, but naturally you want to show to the world just how good you really are. If you're good enough, then you may well be considered one of the elite - an "All-Star", if you will. These are the robots everyone talks about, everyone remembers. It's a great honour to have....but it does come with several expectations. Like, oh, I dunno, doing well.

About two years ago, I did a very similar topic to this, talking about good robots with bad declines. Specifically, the robots who had done really well in past series, only to slip down the slidy-slope of declineness (trademarked) until they were a shadow of their former self. It's a sad state to see them in, true, but not every "All-Star" robot has a decline this severe. In fact, some "All-Star" robots don't even have a decline at all - they just suddenly bottle it and never show up again.

I'm sure every competitor on Robot Wars would have liked to have gone out on a high, or at the very least in a convincing way. It's one thing if your last battle ends with you being overpowered by an obviously vastly superior machine, or being at the wrong end of an extremely tight judges' decision after a well-fought battle that could have legit gone either way. It's quite another, though, if your last battle has you crash out in a manner that simply spells "disappointing", a manner that I'm sure most roboteers would rather forget. In the broadest terms, the robot loses its last battle and leaves us feeling like something is missing; a case of "What Could Have Been". There's nothing worse than a robot disappearing off the face of the earth with what could only be described as "unfulfilled potential". Especially if the reason it lost has almost nothing to do with its competitors.