Spinners- Opinions?

[Ocracoke]

Depends on the match. Some fights are exhibiton fights, others are competiton fights where if you do pull out, you do forfeit that round - best speaking to the event organisers about it if you are concerned. It is also worth noting that we are normally quite a friendly bunch and if you ask the roboteer (who remember will probably have invested similar amounts of time and money into their machines as you) nicely, holding back is a thing.

I do get your concern. I wouldn't want my £1000 MW or even my £300 FW being smashed up within 3 minutes of being in an arena but ultimately, that is the nature of the sport, damage happens. My last MW got turned over and then the bottom panel smashed by a spinner in the Middleweight Championships of 2019, nearly nuking the batteries in the process. I taped the entire thing back together and it went back out into the arena within an hour or so.



The rebuild of the MW involved signifcantly more armour and better durabilty so it will be less likely to happen. In reality, it wasn't spinners that did the most damage to Jibril 1.x, it was flippers where landing on its back often twisted the axe gearshaft. It was only when I upgraded to Titanium that it became less of an issue and I doubled the thickness for the 2.0 version to prevent that happening agan.

I was in the same boat when I started, having only Robot Wars and Battlebots to go off of (having previously applied for Series III and IV of RW). This is why you'll typically see people recommend newcomers to the sport try in the Featherweight oe Beetleweight categories where, arguably, spinners are more potent but the cost of repairing them is that much less. The amount of investment needed drops significantly but still be in the same sort of field as Heavies and Middles (for Feathers, Beetles tend to be in their own events).

If you go to an event like RoboDojo, they have their own Sportsman class as well which Spinners aren't permitted in either which, along with Robots Live!, make a good entrance into the sport.