One thing worth mentioning is that spinners can also get destroyed or beat/destroy themselves too. Reliability plays a huge part and a good few spinners can only dish out one or two big hits before either breaking down or breaking themselves. With sturdy build techniques, you'd be surprised how many hits you can take to be deemed destroyed, or until your opponent breaks. It's also very rare to be completely destroyed; as with Lucy's example, it was absolutely *mangled* in that melee fight (I was one of the guilty party) but the robot was rebuilt and back in the arena for the next round. Another example is that my robot got wrecked in the first melee of a four-day event. I thought that was me out and had a wasted weekend ahead, but I spoke to a few people and we were able to effect a repair for day 2 that allowed me to carry on.

Fighting a spinner isn't an instant death knell for your robot (unless you're fighting Carbide with a robot held together by duct tape, and even then, you could fluke a win) and spinners are inherently part and parcel of combat robotics. Many see taking on spinners as a rite of passage, with a sense of euphoria and pride in your robot if you come out on top too. Many, like me, also take a sadistic pleasure in having their robot wrecked by a spinner, partly for the gratuitous violence, and partly because it shows us what worked and what didn't, and that allows us to make incremental improvements to our robots to become better.

At the end of the day, you will always have options to avoid spinners at almost all events you attend, but the community would never get behind banning them outright just because they've become incredibly powerful. It just makes us all more determined to take them on and come out victorious. And failing that? Embrace the destruction