2012 Lessons Learned:The Negative

[Koko Ed]

What could FIRST stand to improve on from this year?

[Peter Matteson]

What could FIRST stand to improve on from this year?

Field management system.

Someone had to be the first to say it.

[ratdude747]

Field management system.

Someone had to be the first to say it.

Better Radios. Someone had to be the first to say it.

[jwfoss]

Until Einstein, it seemed to me that the control system problems were swept under the rug. While I'm not mad that there are problems (truthfully), technology will always have problems, I am unhappy with the way that FIRST did not listen to the fairly large number of teams presenting the issues throughout 6+ weeks of competition.

It was sad that it had to come to Einstein to make them really see it.

A major topic that I believe FIRST could improve on is the support of veteran teams, rather than what seems like an absolute push for rookies.

[Debbie]

Definitely get rid of the Field Management problems. We lost our first elimination match by only 2 points but had one dead robot. The next alliance had a dead robot (1717) in the exact same location in the following match.

Also, eliminate anything that allows one team to easily manipulate the ranking of another team. Though to some degree you can always do this, this year it was too easy to keep a team down in ranking by refusing to co-op with them. Though we would think Gracious Professionalism would prohibit this from happening, it did.

District trophies were just sad. I understand making them smaller than regional, but the selected trophies were not a good choice.

MSC and MAR teams qualify in week 7 for worlds, not leaving them many choices with STEELE Meetings and freezing them out of events like the ball game and Finale. Something needs to be done to ensure these teams have equal chances to participate in all championship activities.

100 teams is TOO many in a division. You never get to know the teams in your division. Break it down into more divisions of smaller numbers. Allow us more matches to allow for better ranking chances.

Give division trophies as well as Championship trophies. Those getting the championship one could be eliminated from receiving division ones so that more than 10 or so teams out of 400 get recognized at the world level. It would recognize the top 5 teams at worlds (4 division winners, 1 championship winner).

:) Just a few thoughts. :)

[Don Wright]

I know this is sort of Championship specific...

I agree with everything Debbie said above. Just a few to add:

Put screens showing the current matches being played on the field back in the pits. Our pit team barely got to see any matches.

The seating for Einstein was frustrating. As soon as matches were done on Newton, we moved to get seats on Einstein. As soon as we got their, the lower section was already very full so we went up a level and were told that FIRST didn't want anybody on those floors and we had to go back down. We ended up at this point almost all the way around to the side lined up with the curtain separating Einstein from the rest of the dome...i.e. we could barely see the field and had to rely on the screens. Then, we see that they were now letting people up on the second and third floors...it was quite annoying...

If you want teams to use camera tracking, please be considerate where you put LED signs up around in the arenas.

From my understanding, the people on the field queuing the teams were not the most polite or understanding...

[theun4gven]

Get rid of the black volunteer shirts. Volunteers should stand out, and the black shirts did nothing to help that. Even a white shirt would stand out more.

[LeelandS]

I'm going to forget the field issues right now, since EVERYONE knows that's something to be looked into.

First, I think the rule book needs to be more specific. Thare was a lot of ambiguity this year as far as rule interpretation, so I think next time the GDC shouldn't skimp on the rule book. Not saying it needs to be overly detailed, just enough so teams shouldn't need to turn to the Q&A for seemingly simple rule clarifications.

Also, if FIRST is going to use a more general rulebook, they need to be prepared to back it up WITH the Q&A. We all know what happened to 118 earlier this year, and though it pretty much turned out alright for them, I feel it was an unfair move by The GDC to refuse to answer their question when the rules on what and what was not grappling were so vague.

I also think FIRST should move away from that age-old rule that teams aren't allowed to check field measurements for themselves. I don't see what harm there is in letting a drive crew/coach onto the field prior to opening ceremonies/the driver meeting with a tape measure to take some measurements. Or for an FTA to do it themselves and publish the results to all the teams. FIRST seems to cringe at the thought that their volunteers built their own field wrong, but I don't really see the harm.

I also think FIRST needs to be more careful when it comes to Hybrid/Autonomous points. The GDC ruled that as long as a ball entered the net in Hybrid, it would count for the full Hybrid points. I saw several times where it did not. Either they need to make sure field personel know the deal with those, or they need to think about their sensor placement (i.e. a sensor on the hoop. I know that would be pretty difficult to implement, it's just an example).

I, personally, would like to see FIRST stray away from games where game piece deterioration isn't such a huge factor, but I know what pretty much impossible. But I can wish.

Those are pretty much my gripes. Nothing too extreme. Just some logistical stuff.

[Gdeaver]

First has a serious internal problem at HQ. An immediate investigation needs to be launched at HQ. WHO sent out that VIP invitation to Mr. Murphy and Mr. Finagle ???? Anyone in technology should have know that those SOB's are on the black list. I will be very mad if it is found that First picked up the travel expenses. This investigation should be handled by an outside firm and I expect transparency. This can not be allowed to happen again.

[Rob Stehlik]

Please bring back the live feed to the pits!

[Anupam Goli]

First has a serious internal problem at HQ. An immediate investigation needs to be launched at HQ. WHO sent out that VIP invitation to Mr. Murphy and Mr. Finagle ???? Anyone in technology should have know that those SOB's are on the black list. I will be very mad if it is found that First picked up the travel expenses. This investigation should be handled by an outside firm and I expect transparency. This can not be allowed to happen again.

I see what you did there...

One negative that I saw were the rules on bumpers. They were specific. Should they be this specific? Also, there are varied interpretations on those rules by various inspectors. A while back, it was posted on here by an inspector that we had to have 8 inches of frame backing the bumper as well, but at the Peachtree regional, the head inspector said that was not an issue, and we just had to have 8 inches of bumper. We essentially wasted precious hours trying to extend the frame when the head inspector came over and said that wasn't the issue.

[RoboMom]

Get rid of the black volunteer shirts. Volunteers should stand out, and the black shirts did nothing to help that. Even a white shirt would stand out more.

I respectfully disagree. As someone who was issued one shirt for 4 days of sweaty volunteering, black held up better than the traditional white of the past.
ps. I guess this post really belongs in the positive thread...

[Nate Laverdure]

[EDIT: At CMP especially,] provide more than one printed copy of the match schedule. Or install a photocopier in Pit Admin for team use.

[JesseK]

The game was a lot to keep up with for the refs at champs. There was at least 1 instance of a [G28] in Curie SF-2-1 and a very obvious [G27] in SF 2-2. The ref that was right next to the areas of contact was looking at the other side of the field both times. Perhaps consider adding 1-2 refs per field at champs since the level of play is always greater than at Regionals.

The teams posting questions to Q&A's need to be more direct. If they aren't direct, they need to quit their [whining] when the GDC makes an event-time decision on whether something is within the intent of the rules. Teams who aren't part of the team who the decision may go against especially need to quit their whining. No one likes whiners, especially those who think they're whining on others' behalf.

[Jared Russell]

Need video feeds to the pits. It is ridiculous that our pit crew does not get to watch us play!!!

The Kinect was not a well thought-out addition to the game this year. (Unless you are 987 :)

[Nick Lawrence]

I really missed having no video feed of matches in the pits.

Match cycle times would be greatly improved if FIRST would move to a faster-booting bridge. I miss the little black Linksys bridges from 2009, they only took 15 seconds to boot up. It sucks having to wait for the radio to boot after the cRIO has been booted for 30 seconds already. It would make for faster match cycles, which would make for more matches for more teams.

Or just get rid of it altogether and move to a more reliable system...

They could also debug the FMS software a bit more thoroughly.

-Nick

[ratdude747]

]
I also think FIRST should move away from that age-old rule that teams aren't allowed to check field measurements for themselves. I don't see what harm there is in letting a drive crew/coach onto the field prior to opening ceremonies/the driver meeting with a tape measure to take some measurements. Or for an FTA to do it themselves and publish the results to all the teams. FIRST seems to cringe at the thought that their volunteers built their own field wrong, but I don't really see the harm.

This issue happened to 1747 in 2010. The field used at BMR was off as the tunnel was IIRC 1/2" too low. The robot didn't have that amount of tolerance height wise (it was pretty crammed to say the least) and it caused the robot to be unable to to use the tunnel. This issue might have cost us the regional, as one reason why we lost in the SFs was due to being blocked from crossing bumps by the defense.

BTW, the same field appeared at our second regional (Buckeye) as well... http://www.badcaps.net/forum/images/smilies/facepalm.gif

[Astrokid248]

If someone posts a question, and you don't answer, and someone posts a more specific version of the question trying desperately to get some sort of a ruling, POST THE D@#N ANSWER. DO NOT say something like "we're not going to review your design" and then backtrack 6 weeks later. Along those lines, use common definitions of words and tell everyone what dictionary you're using, like Webster 7th Edition, so that all of us who aren't in the GDC can go look up the words and better determine how to design our robots until you answer our questions.
Set up a day before the first week of regionals for any teams to come test their robots and the FMS. Run as many sensor heavy matches as possible and work out any kinks in the system before the competition season starts. Even if you get a new, foolproof wireless system, DO IT ANYWAYS.
Give volunteers multiple shirts. There's no reason to force them to sweat in the same shirt day by day. Also, hold a briefing before each regional and championships for any new volunteers about etiquette and what the heck FIRST is. (We'll do the same with our kids.)
Come up with an entrance plan; crowd crush is inexcusable.
Live feed in the pits; if you want clean pits and safety, you need to make it so that pit crew members can watch the matches without having to abandon the pit area.
As Nate said, put a photocopier/computer with attached printer in the pits. Also, it'd be nice to have electronic copies of the schedules (toss them on a cheap, Air Force-branded pen drive) since many of us like color-coding them but can't ever post color coded copies until midway through seeding matches.

[ratdude747]

Match cycle times would be greatly improved if FIRST would move to a faster-booting bridge. I miss the little black Linksys bridges from 2009, they only took 15 seconds to boot up. It sucks having to wait for the radio to boot after the cRIO has been booted for 30 seconds already. It would make for faster match cycles, which would make for more matches for more teams.


Suggestion to FIRST: allow teams to use the black boxes and a 5 port switch- they even make them in the d-link's exact form factor (I have one in my junk bin) . Yeah, it would draw a shade more power, but it would allow future use of field-specific radios and might perhaps reduce the load on the wireless AP (for intra-robot comms).

[Craig Roys]

If you want teams to use camera tracking, please be considerate where you put LED signs up around in the arenas.

Or better yet, why not give us illuminated targets? A simple LED strip instead of reflective tape marking the backboards would have solved most tracking problems which, in turn, would make the game even more exciting.

[twetherbee]

I would have liked to have seen a separate practice bridge in the pits. With as much as the triple balance was worth and how specifically the combinations of robots had to fit together, it was very unfortunate that it was so complicated to get combinations of robots together to try it. Seems like they could have replaced the extra hoop off to the side with a bridge practice area (like so many regionals, including ours in Vegas, had) and let more teams onto the main field for hoop practice.

[Jared Russell]

Or better yet, why not give us illuminated targets? A simple LED strip instead of reflective tape marking the backboards would have solved most tracking problems which, in turn, would make the game even more exciting.

Having illuminated targets does not solve the problem that Don mentions. The retroreflective targets where just as easy to track (if not moreso) than self-illuminated targets...but in either case there is always the possibility that something off in the distance will be look the "same" to your vision system (in color if not in shape/size).

An opaque top backboard would have partially addressed this, and it's not like the audience seated behind the ends of the field was able to see anything anyhow.

[Solidstate89]

Also, eliminate anything that allows one team to easily manipulate the ranking of another team. Though to some degree you can always do this, this year it was too easy to keep a team down in ranking by refusing to co-op with them. Though we would think Gracious Professionalism would prohibit this from happening, it did.

This. So much this. The idea of having teams to cooperate with eachother for a common good is in theory a great thing. Especially since most teams follow the creed of gracious professionalism. We encountered at least one instance this year though where a team flat out told us they would not balance with us.

[Sunshine]

This. So much this. The idea of having teams to cooperate with eachother for a common good is in theory a great thing. Especially since most teams follow the creed of gracious professionalism. We encountered at least one instance this year though where a team flat out told us they would not balance with us.

That's better than having the team who says they will balance with you and they never show up. How unGP is that?

I understand the intent but IMHO the reality is that cooperation points are not working and hurt the game. Those same people you are competing against can prevent you from a good ranking. Unfortunately there are a few who believe this is a legit strategy of the game. As a result, the intent of COOP points is doing the exact opposite of the great intentions from FIRST.

[Koko Ed]

That's better than having the team who says they will balance with you and they never show up. How unGP is that?


I saw a team accept an alliance selection at an off season last year and then leave immediately. The team that picked them was none too pleased.

[techhelpbb]

1. Own problems and when you get owned by problems know when and how to ask for help. That goes for everyone, but in this particular case FIRST as well.

2. Provide a level playing field for troubleshooting to eliminate power quality issues leaving dead robots on the field (that's been going on to some extent for 17 years that I know of).

3. Provide more electronics support at the competitions and more parts to support troubleshooting in the spare parts.

4. Characterize all the parts from the KOP and control system so that teams do not have to clean up later.

5. Open up more factual data about the field.

5. Track much more information about events, teams, robots, problems and be quick and fair to act on problems.

6. Encourage much more community participation directly to the canopy of control at FIRST before, during and after competition. Especially when number 1 above applies. Also take more interest in additional input gotten from beta tests.

[huberje]

This. So much this. The idea of having teams to cooperate with eachother for a common good is in theory a great thing. Especially since most teams follow the creed of gracious professionalism. We encountered at least one instance this year though where a team flat out told us they would not balance with us.

While for the most part it is beneficial for everyone if the Co-Op bridge is present, I would imagine there is at least one scenario where it is in a team's best interest to make sure the Co-Op bridge is not balanced. This is a strategy decision and it is unfair to say they are acting against the idea of Gracious Professionalism and not know why they chose to make that decision.

If you want the bridge balanced, the other teams on the alliance can probably be convinced to help you with that, as it may be in their best interest for that to happen.

[Solidstate89]

While for the most part it is beneficial for everyone if the Co-Op bridge is present, I would imagine there is at least one scenario where it is in a team's best interest to make sure the Co-Op bridge is not balanced. This is a strategy decision and it is unfair to say they are acting against the idea of Gracious Professionalism and not know why they chose to make that decision.

If you want the bridge balanced, the other teams on the alliance can probably be convinced to help you with that, as it may be in their best interest for that to happen.

Except refusing to balance with us did not help this team in the rankings at all. They were in bottom 50. It would have made no difference to their team's individual ranking.

[rees2001]

1. There needs to be a safer setup for teams entering the building at the start of the day. I know this has been discussed but it happens at most events. There should be a way to keep people from rushing the doors and running to the seats. If my team get there at 6AM I should get better seats than the team that shows up just before the doors open and shoves their way to the front. You have seating charts for the arenas, let teams designate where they want to be and avoid the unsafe behaviors. Maybe you should position a judge or 2 by the doorway. That may change some behaviors.

2. There needs to be a better way to have teams bring their stuff into the pits. Again, it was a mad rush of people to get their stuff to their pits so they could get to work as soon as possible.

3. Fewer teams at Champs. There were just way too many teams there.

4. Fix the match listings. I may be the only person to say this but our match listings were unfair. We had to play 7 of the top 15 team in our division and got the pleasure of playing with 7 of the bottom 20. We finished 3 - 6 and placed in 36th place, only because of the co-op bridge. Our last match was against 2 teams that ended up on Einstein (548 and 118, and our partners finished in 74th & 90th).

5. Video in the pits at champs. It is a long walk to get to the field and too often our pit crew couldn’t watch matches.

[techhelpbb]

5. Video in the pits at champs. It is a long walk to get to the field and too often our pit crew couldn’t watch matches.

Let me second this. At MAR Mount Olive it took a bit for people to get video in the pits using my laptop and finally getting the feed into the pit area.

It was obviously a different event but it should be similar for any event and I've seen this issue repeatedly over the years.

[BJC]

One of my negitives is the FIRST Q and A system. It's horrible. Teams should not EVER have to wait until their first competiton to find out that their robot is illegal if they have tried to clarify it in the Q and A. Furthermore, teams should have a guarentee that their question will be answered. The Q and A's purpose is to help teams design robots within the rules, if team's are not getting helpful answers after waiting who knows how long, that is not acceptable and the Q and A is not doing it's job. When I compair the FIRST Q and A to the VEX Q and A, I am embarassed for FIRST.

Regards, Bryan

[techhelpbb]

One of my negitives is the FIRST Q and A system. It's horrible. Teams should not EVER have to wait until their first competiton to find out that their robot is illegal if they have tried to clarify it in the Q and A. Furthermore, teams should have a guarentee that their question will be answered. The Q and A's purpose is to help teams design robots within the rules, if team's are not getting helpful answers after waiting who knows how long, that is not acceptable and the Q and A is not doing it's job. When I compair the FIRST Q and A to the VEX Q and A, I am embarassed for FIRST.

Regards, Bryan

I second that as well. I have stated in these forums my own concerns about the fact that Team 11 asked a question that impacted all teams in the entire competition. The answer wasn't posted until it was nearly impossible for it to even have been of value.

[thefro526]

Game piece Consistency was a huge issue this year. Wear and tear were somewhat predictable by the time later regionals came around, but balls from different batches were not. From my experience, there were at least 3 or 4 different types of balls, those bought direct from the manufacturer, those bought from AM, those given in the KOP and those used at the Championship.

[Nemo]

That's better than having the team who says they will balance with you and they never show up. How unGP is that?

I understand the intent but IMHO the reality is that cooperation points are not working and hurt the game. Those same people you are competing against can prevent you from a good ranking. Unfortunately there are a few who believe this is a legit strategy of the game. As a result, the intent of COOP points is doing the exact opposite of the great intentions from FIRST.

I totally disagree. The number of times alliances cooperated with each other is way higher than the number of times multiple teams conspired to hose a good team. Fact: this year, lots and lots of teams cooperated with each other to gain a mutual benefit. At least in the case of our team, that resulted in many positive interactions with teams that we otherwise wouldn't have had a chance to work together with. I'd guess that the GDC's "great intentions" ran at least partly along these lines.

Also, look at all of the teams that won #1 seeds this year. They are consistently really good teams who deserved to be there, and the number of exceptions doesn't seem much different to me than it has been in past years. This indicates to me that it was either not that common or not that easy for teams to collude and hurt the best teams' rankings.

[Solidstate89]

Game piece Consistency was a huge issue this year. Wear and tear were somewhat predictable by the time later regionals came around, but balls from different batches were not. From my experience, there were at least 3 or 4 different types of balls, those bought direct from the manufacturer, those bought from AM, those given in the KOP and those used at the Championship.

This was something that really hurt us in St. Louis. The balls at the FLR and Buckeye regionals were pretty much identical to what we received in the KOP. We rarely ran into issues (only once or twice in total) with the balls getting stuck but the ones that did were usually the newer ones. Nothing you can do about that.

The ones at St. Louis though had to be completely different. We got so many of those stuck in our loader mechanism it bordered on the ridiculous. It definitely wasn't just the fact they were newer balls. As you said, they were definitely a different batch.

[rocknthehawk]

Game piece Consistency was a huge issue this year. Wear and tear were somewhat predictable by the time later regionals came around, but balls from different batches were not. From my experience, there were at least 3 or 4 different types of balls, those bought direct from the manufacturer, those bought from AM, those given in the KOP and those used at the Championship.

I second this. Also, a clarification of when different balls would be used. Our team (and I know of others) had their shooters calibrated for new or used balls. New balls being used at CT elim matches gave us no chance to change our shooter speed or position. Whereas GUS was having trouble with the used balls in quals. I would have like a clarification in an update for some sort of game piece schedule, IE a line stating new balls would be used in elims.

[apalrd]

1. Practice field at CMP. Almost all teams who use the practice field are looking to test specific things, in this game they are:
-Running their autonomous programs - This requires a basket and key, and possibly a bridge, all at the correct distances
-Shooting balls - This requires a basket and marked key distance
-Driving and shooting - This requires more open space than above, but the general key and basket area is usually sufficient to simulate a driver lining up
-Triple balance before elims
None of these require a field border or radios - A 50' tether is sufficient.

At MSC, there was a large carpet area with 2 baskets, 3 bridges, and two movable bumps. Teams would tell the practice field queue what they needed to test and what their setup requirements were, and he would organize where each team could be. There were no practice field radios, all teams ran on tethers. Immediately after alliance selections, the three bridges were reserved for each alliance in the order they had to play (e.g. QF1 teams gets to practice before QF4 teams), allowing each alliance to practice their triple balance. The practice field seemed adequate for the volume of teams - a 64 team event with 2 baskets and 3 bridges, allowing multiple teams to use a set of baskets at the same time

At CMP, there were two full practice fields which required several hours of advanced notice to sign up for an use. The radios also caused mass confusion due to the mis-coloring of the red and blue radios (at least on the Galileo practice field). They had a single set of baskets behind the practice field, and two more in the annex on the way to the dome. For an event of this size, there should have been at least 3 bridges and 4 baskets per division (total of 12 bridges and 16 baskets required, there were only 6 bridges and 7 baskets at the whole event this year)


2. I have to say it, the quality of teams at CMP this year was disappointing. The league is too large to hope to allow each team to go to CMP every few years, so even trying seems pointless.

3. The vision system this year was fairly good, but a different geometric shape should be chosen (how about a circle?) - There are too many bright rectangular objects but relatively few bright circular objects. I know our vision system was often confused by large white display screens directly behind fields.

4. I've already talked to a few NI people about this, but (at least in LabVIEW) most of the CPU load on the processor is overhead from LabVIEW and library inefficiency, not actual team code.

5. On a related note, the fact that teams are able to hit 90% CPU utilization without running vision on the robot amazes me. The processor is definitely powerful enough (the old IFI PIC and Vex Cortex systems run much smaller processors, and almost everything being done now could be done then), but the inefficiency is SO HUGE

6. Ball consistency on bridges. At all previous events, the field reset people were placing the balls on two holes in the center of the bridge. At CMP (Galileo division), we found that they were consistently placing them on the outside holes, or in various other symmetric but not centered positions, during our matches, but only on the center bridge. Our scouting team investigated the issue, and the balls were only being placed off-center during only our matches and in matches where teams were attempting bridge autonomous modes. When we asked the field reset and head ref on our field, they claimed that the balls had to be symmetric, nothing else, and started placing the balls on the alliance bridges differently as well. We brought a Q&A question which stated that the balls would be centered on the bridge, and they ignored it. We talked to Aiden Brown on the issue, and the ball placement stopped immediately after.

[Brian Selle]

The practice field situation at the championships was pitiful. 400 teams, 2 full, and 3 wooden fields? Come on. It would be nice if they left an area for teams to set up their own goals.

[Akash Rastogi]

Except refusing to balance with us did not help this team in the rankings at all. They were in bottom 50. It would have made no difference to their team's individual ranking.

Having already explained this in emails to your team, I'm surprised it is brought up yet again in a thread.

The highlighted part is where you yourself can see why our alliance did not co-op balance. The co-op bridge is for mutual benefit. Our alliance, as stated by yourself, had no potential benefit from doing so. We all had 1 or 2 matches each left in qualifications, and we knew our standings would not improve. The co-op bridge goal is to mutually boost rankings. Since we did not have a legitimate chance at the top 8 seeds, we chose not to co-op and instead we chose to display the strong suits of each of our robots.

We were not being ungracious or unprofessional about the situation. We were playing our game as we saw fit. We, in your best interest, had let you know of the strategy beforehand so that there would be no surprise. Also, none of the teams involved were pressured into agreeing on the strategy. 254, 415, and 3929 were pretty unanimous about it.

PM me if you would like to continue the discussion further. :)

[Mr V]

The coopertition award, yes the coopertition bridge was successful in mixing up the rankings but it made the award based way too much on luck. Last years coopertition award system was the best ever. To win it you had to: A make a minibot that was one that other teams wanted to use because it was a good performer, B approach and "sell" other teams on why they should use your minibot, C sometimes assist that team in either adapting their deployment system to accept your minibot or building or help them build a system to deploy it. For us it created some strong bonds between those teams to which we loaned minibots that continues, as well as being used by other teams to promote their teams and expand their programs since in many cases we sent them home with the teams after the season was over.

Kinnect, it essentially made the GDC look as if they were for sale. On a related note the Innovation in control award which at least at the events I attended was based on being the only team using the Kinnect.

The Q&A system which was even harder to navigate and find what you were looking for than before. Never mind the "no comment" answers as in previous years.

[Dad1279]

1) Follow and enforce the rules that are in place. If teams are expected to follow the rules, as should field personnel, inspectors, and volunteers.

2) Don't ignore the students.

Multiple times our students questioned a situation that did not agree with rules and procedures published, and were either ridiculed or ignored.

[stuart2054]

Definitely get rid of the Field Management problems. We lost our first elimination match by only 2 points but had one dead robot. The next alliance had a dead robot (1717) in the exact same location in the following match.

Also, eliminate anything that allows one team to easily manipulate the ranking of another team. Though to some degree you can always do this, this year it was too easy to keep a team down in ranking by refusing to co-op with them. Though we would think Gracious Professionalism would prohibit this from happening, it did.

District trophies were just sad. I understand making them smaller than regional, but the selected trophies were not a good choice.

MSC and MAR teams qualify in week 7 for worlds, not leaving them many choices with STEELE Meetings and freezing them out of events like the ball game and Finale. Something needs to be done to ensure these teams have equal chances to participate in all championship activities.

100 teams is TOO many in a division. You never get to know the teams in your division. Break it down into more divisions of smaller numbers. Allow us more matches to allow for better ranking chances.

Give division trophies as well as Championship trophies. Those getting the championship one could be eliminated from receiving division ones so that more than 10 or so teams out of 400 get recognized at the world level. It would recognize the top 5 teams at worlds (4 division winners, 1 championship winner).

:) Just a few thoughts. :)

I agree with Debbies assessment and have a few other suggestions.

1. The fields were too close to the spectator seating. You could not see the closest alliance bridge well from most of the seats. Moving them away 20-40 feet would help a lot.

2. I would like to see a move to more competition based entrance into the championship. I have no problem rookie all stars and HOF teams being there but it when there are 50% or more teams in all the divisions that have very limited robots and teams lack experience with the game it makes seeding matches a very "Luck of the draw" thing. Although there are many more very good teams in a championship division than a district or regional event the less experienced teams brought the seeding matches down to district event type play in my opinion. It didn't look like a championship to me until after alliance selection.

3. There should be a team entrance on the side of the dome where the trailers and parking was. I am not sure about others but our team likes to tailgate at these events and it is a pain to walk all around the dome to get back in.


Just some of my opinions.

[JesseK]

Kinnect, it essentially made the GDC look as if they were for sale. On a related note the Innovation in control award which at least at the events I attended was based on being the only team using the Kinnect.

At VCU the Innovaction in Control award went to the only team to get Vision Tracking working due to the magnificently bright advertisements on the arena's walls. How did they do it? They went to the fender and made some lights blink based upon Vision Tracking status. It wasn't automated aiming at all :/ I only know because I asked them how they were able to get vision tracking working with the lights behind the field.

That brings up something that's kind of irked me for a couple of years.

Judges could CARE LESS if the programmers on a team built a custom display app out of Java or C++ that displays data to the drivers. They either dismiss is as "oh, anyone can build a web page" or "the driver's display means your stuff isn't automated". What a load of crap.

Building a Java app with a custom layout tailored for the drivers is the closest thing a team will get to a full software development cycle in FRC (including Systems Engineering, Coding, I&T phases). It also requires some technical prowess to debug things in order to ensure the system runs smoothly while on the field. It's also more realistic since there isn't a single automated dynamic interactive system in the world that doesn't have some sort of human-in-the-loop control. Eventually our second driver will move solely to the app on a touchscreen panel when open-architecture tablets become reasonably priced. Maybe then the judges will think something of it :rolleyes:

[jblay]

100 teams is TOO many in a division. You never get to know the teams in your division. Break it down into more divisions of smaller numbers. Allow us more matches to allow for better ranking chances.

Either do this or get rid of signup for championship and make it pure qualification to decrease the number of teams in each division if FIRST doesn't have the space or people for more fields. I personally think that the ability for any team to signup for championship and not earn their way in takes away from the quality of play at championship.

I would have liked to have seen a separate practice bridge in the pits. With as much as the triple balance was worth and how specifically the combinations of robots had to fit together, it was very unfortunate that it was so complicated to get combinations of robots together to try it. Seems like they could have replaced the extra hoop off to the side with a bridge practice area (like so many regionals, including ours in Vegas, had) and let more teams onto the main field for hoop practice.

This was ridiculous. For a team like ours who was long and had a stinger, we knew we could triple with another long robot, but no team would spend their practice spot to learn if we were a viable 2nd round pick because it made more sense for them to learn if they could triple with one of the elite long robots. I don't blame the teams for this at all because I would do the same exact thing, you only have so many slots and to spend it on us isn't worth it.

[moonlight]

The Seating for Einstein was indeed frustrating :ahh: i think it would be waaay better if the Awards and the Einstein field were positioned in the widest side od the Dome (were Newton and Archimides were set up this year) that way more people would get a chance to have a better view of the game.

[PaW]

More video feeds.

MSC set the standard this year by having a 'fixed, full-field' view, and supplemented by a 'roaming/closeup' view. Viewing both simultaneously is optimum for those of us at home (or work!).

I would have expected no less for Einstein at least.

[topgun]

I would like to see practice matches at 3 day regionals go until the pits close on Thursday. That beautiful field is mostly empty from about 4:30 p.m. on. People could be practicing and tuning rather than struggling on the practice field.

I would like to see lower cost regionals. The price per match is extremely high, even if you make it to eliminations.

I would like to see adults allowed to train student drive team coaches during the practice day at at 3 day regional.

I would like to see participation pins distributed to teams based on roster size rather than a straight 25 per team.

I would like to see brightly colored caps for the field reset crew so they stand out from the others near the field.

[dag0620]

I would like to see participation pins distributed to teams based on roster size rather than a straight 25 per team.
.

Now while I do understand there could be issues having this happen, I think it may be a good idea.

FIRST is always saying how there trying to cut costs. If we did it by roster size, excess pins wouldn't be given to smaller teams, and the larger teams would be covered.

My $0.02 on the issue.

[omalleyj]

Me too on the FMS stuff.

The balls. This is the second time in the time I have been mentoring that the balls have really impacted things. Lunacy year the primary game piece was discontinued by the manufacturer, so I guess this wasn't quite as bad. But when you take all of your KoP and AndyMark balls and they are all within a tolerance and then the competition comes and they are WAY different it is a pain. Couple with the fact that we are now in a district model and there were no practice days, just a match or two, and retuning was 'exciting'.

Also, as one who had to watch the championship online: please have the NASA coverage go all the way to the end! They stopped at 6! While I appreciate the time, effort , and expense that the teams who stream go to, the stream quality just can't measure up to NASA's. It was Heidi all over again! (older NFL fans know what I am talking about :) )

Coopertition (I also posted it as being a Good Thing in that thread). That FIRST got a strategy that really threw a curve ball was a good thing. That it got teams arguing and divisive at times was definitely not. That I think is a question of resetting expectations for how you go about getting top seeded. But unless FIRST comes up with equally compelling coopertition schemes going forward that may be difficult.

[omalleyj]

Ooops, Forgot my Kinect Rant:

Why was a device made to track humans put in areas where humans (other than the human player) could easily walk through? At every event (we went to 4) we had instances of people including photographers and field personnel walk through or into the Kinect area during hybrid. There needs to be something more than lines on the floor, especially when so few teams utilize the Kinect.

How about "Drivers behind the lines; confused bystanders out of the Kinect areas; 3, 2, 1, GO." :)

[Libby K]

Einstein is its own story, and since FIRST has already set out that they're looking into the issues and want to make it right, I don't think there's much need to touch that subject here.

Coopertition is a good thing, a core value of FIRST, and a neat element of Rebound Rumble. The unfortunate stories I've heard from many events regarding bullying and manipulation of other teams into non-cooperating is not.

From the other thread...
I challenge everyone to make The Positive thread longer than The Negative thread.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=106207

Please, go add the positives. So often, we focus on the bad things. And yes, there were bad things that happened this year. Inexcusable things. But there were also plenty of positives. FIRST reads Chief Delphi and I am sure they would appreciate your support on both threads, so long as posts stay constructive.

[LH Machinist]

The coopertition bridge allowed teams to be ranked higher than their abilities and I saw numerous "respectfully declines". IMO - this is humiliating especially if you receive more than one decline.

The coopertition points should have been the first tie breaker after your W/L/T record.

[IndySam]

The Coop award made no sense at all. I bet there was nobody at most regionals that could even explain how it was determined.

[techhelpbb]

The GP award made no sense at all. I bet there was nobody at most regionals that could even explain how it was determined.

Not to sound biased given we got one:

If you've followed our team around for a bit you'd see why other teams would vote to give that award to us, our opinion of ourselves irrelevant.

I'm rarely more proud of my team than when they go all out (including rebuilding other people's robots from scratch with them) doing the right things, not just what it takes to win.

[IndySam]

Not to sound biased given we got one:

If you've followed our team around for a bit you'd see why other teams would vote to give that award to us, our opinion of ourselves irrelevant.

I'm rarely more proud of my team than when they go all out (including rebuilding other people's robots from scratch with them) doing the right things, not just what it takes to win.

Sorry I meant Coop.


I love the GP award.

[1986titans]

Better webcasts. I didn't really watch so many before this year because I was always going to the regionals with the team. I'd say the GKC Regional (http://www.more.net/first-robotics) is probably a model other regionals/districts should try to reach/emulate.

It has:
Almost instant access to matches, so if you barely miss seeing a team play, you aren't out of luck.
A semi-permanent archive
A good connection


These were things that it seemed like a lot of regionals lacked. Quality was definitely an issue with some regionals. I had to watch one regional 1986 went to with the sound off because the stream skipped every few seconds.

I'm not sure why FIRST doesn't try to do something like the Blue Alliance for themselves. It seems like they should be interested in keeping archive footage. I'm also not sure why FIRST is staying out of providing the webcasts to begin with either.

[AllenGregoryIV]

As Nate said, put a photocopier/computer with attached printer in the pits. Also, it'd be nice to have electronic copies of the schedules (toss them on a cheap, Air Force-branded pen drive) since many of us like color-coding them but can't ever post color coded copies until midway through seeding matches.


I started bringing a printer/copier/scanner to competition years ago, anyone that's ever at a competition with Spectrum stop by and will make you copies. It's only like $100 for the entire competition season, with a new printer and replacement ink. It's useful for a lot of other things besides match schedules as well.

I make pocket schedules for all my team members that only have our matches on them, takes about 5 mins. I did it for a couple other teams at championship as well.

Having FIRST do this would be far too difficult, this is something that teams can take care of easily and at not too much of an expense.

[J93Wagner]

Watching the streams on The Red Alliance was great... Except for one thing. Terrible stream quality due to the lack of good equipment at events. It's minor compared to a lot of things here, except when you're trying to get someone to watch a few matches and it is almost impossible to tell what is going on.

Edit: I guess I got beat to it by Paul.

[JuliaGreen]

I would like to have written feedback from the Chairman's Award judges for every team that presents at a regional or CMP. There is a judging rubric out there - I'd like to see something that helps the students understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Julia

[Adam Freeman]

Better webcasts.

I agree. Especially for the Championship. I had a handful of people from work and family trying to watch the Archimedes webcast.

One of my co-workers videoed his computer screen to show me what he was seeing for most of the time he tried to watch the Archimedes eliminations.

http://youtu.be/L_flbSCBvQw

Apparently all other field feeds were working fine...except for the one he really wanted to see.

How are we supposed to get people interested in FIRST, if we can't show them?

[vhcook]

I deeply dislike the new Q&A system. The number of clicks to get each answer in the new system when trying to keep up with all of the rulings was excessive. The new system's design seems to have an flawed assumption that we only care about the answers to questions we asked.

I really wish the Q&A system had an easy way to pull a digest of all answers (and their questions) since X date or last visit, since that would exactly match the reasons I go there.

I also missed having the referees summarize fouls at the end of the match. I like the instant scoring, but sometimes I was looking at the other end and didn't see the foul or referee hand signal happen.

[rocknthehawk]

I would like to have written feedback from the Chairman's Award judges for every team that presents at a regional or CMP. There is a judging rubric out there - I'd like to see something that helps the students understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Julia

Is this not standard? I know we picked up our Chairman's feedback from pit admin after awards were over. (At GSR). It is hugely helpful, pointing out our strengths, and the one thing we didn't touch on. We won EI and will push harder for RCA next year

[nitneylion452]

Ooops, Forgot my Kinect Rant:

Why was a device made to track humans put in areas where humans (other than the human player) could easily walk through? At every event (we went to 4) we had instances of people including photographers and field personnel walk through or into the Kinect area during hybrid. There needs to be something more than lines on the floor, especially when so few teams utilize the Kinect.

How about "Drivers behind the lines; confused bystanders out of the Kinect areas; 3, 2, 1, GO." :)

At the MAR Championship, we were blocking the Kinect area from the time we got the green light to the time hybrid ended. Our field supervisors made sure that nobody and I mean NOBODY (I had to keep some of the esteemed VIPs from walking through) through until hybrid was over. We made it a point that teams who used Kinect weren't interfered with during its operation.


To comment on the thread: I like the new radio (mainly because of the AP option for team use) but something with a faster boot time needs to be used. Also, the communication issues I witnessed at the MAR Championship were disgraceful. Teams sometimes spent 7 or 8 minutes with the FTA to get their robot connected, only to have it lose comms a few seconds in to the match (1676 comes to mind here). It was a shame.

Also, an issue I was personally affected by was the method to dislodge balls from the baskets. During the MAR Championship elimination tournament, alliance 1 (341, 25, 1640) clogged the basket in hybrid with no fewer than 6 balls. I was behind the basket attempting to nudge them lose, to no avail, so we had to restart due to a field malfunction. As I came out on to the field, I fake cried and said, "They just wouldn't stop coming! They just wouldn't stop!" I was told by 25's coach that they shot on something like 5,6,7,8, and 9 second marks, so I just had to be ready. I jokingly replied with "So I get .5 seconds to react? Sweet!" We both laughed and got back to the match.

Anyway, something to prevent the jamming of game pieces needs to be implemented any time something like this year's game is done. A pole to poke the balls wasn't nearly effective enough.

[Nemo]

On better webcasts: I totally agree.

To add to that, I think it would be useful to have some guidelines to give to all of the camera people on where to point the camera when. If you're trying to watch a particular robot, as most people probably are, it is very frustrating when the feed focuses in on the one robot that isn't working for 20 seconds at a time. Or if it focuses on a robot that is about to shoot, and then pans to another angle before we get to see the shots. Etc. etc.

Echoing what was said above, it would be great if FIRST would take charge of this and do it right: high resolution video, 2+ views including a full field view, archived and easily accessible according to event and match number, reliable live stream, etc.

That would have obvious benefits in getting more people exposed to FIRST. The grainy feeds where you can't even recognize team numbers, or even really see what a robot looks like, do a poor job of showing how cool FRC is. Those feeds are only really useful for people who already know how the game works and what the particular robots they're watching for look like.

Also... video feeds of sufficiently high quality would allow stat nerds to compile actual stats for every event. That would be sweet!

[Grim Tuesday]

The GP award made no sense at all. I bet there was nobody at most regionals that could even explain how it was determined.

Quoted for truth. I don't think the GP Award could have concrete criteria, or else they would have to make concrete definitions for GP, which is somewhat against the concept. At the same time, it should be about general GP of the team, and not about a single event (though it can be). Also, deciding on it before elims is silly. The greatest case of GP in FIRST tend to happen during eliminations. For example, at Champs this year, I would have given it to all the teams on Einstein for being gracious and professional about the whole ordeal.

The moment that made me realize what GP was about (I'll tell this story any time I get a chance) was in 2010 Philly, where an alliance of 341 and 365 called a time out for our 7th seeded alliance so we could fix one of our robots. We had already used our coupon, and our alliance was the biggest challenger to them. They called a timeout, giving our alliance enough time to make a C-RIO changeout and have a 3v3 match. We ended up losing 7-8 due to a penalty, but that gesture will always stay with me and is a testament to what its like to play against two HoF teams on one alliance.

On the subject of competition this season, I would have to say my biggest complaint is the manual. This years manual was vague to say the least. Glossary. There needs to be one. If the GDC insists that the game is played exactly the way they want it to, we would never see any of the really cool an unique robot designs. For that to happen, teams must have the freedom to know if their designs are legal or not. If the excuse for not giving specific definitions is that they will in Q&A (as was stated at FRC Live), they need to actually give the definitions asked for in Q&A. A second thing that struck me about the FRC Live is that they said that they were simplifying the manual "because some teams don't read it". We shouldn't reward them for not reading the manual, and cater to them at the expense of unique designs.

No internet/power in the stands was a big inconvenience for our team. Would be nice for FIRST to contract with whatever venue they have for internet during the competition.

Suggestion for FIRST: Send a recording device along with each field for archiving events. With their goal of bringing back alumni, it feels like they are forgetting old games relying on teams to record them. I can barely find any media of games before ~2004 or so, and FIRST has a much longer heritage than that. FIRST Official webcasts would be nice too, if their goal is more media coverage, this wouldn't be a bad place to start.

Overall, an excellent season.

[Racer26]

A few things:

Someone mentioned earlier in the thread the matchmaking algorithm. It patently doesn't suck. It's a very complex multidimensional matrix problem, and it does a very good job at producing a 'fair' schedule. It makes an assumption that all teams are equal in power, and thus, a given schedule will be 'harder' or 'easier' for some teams. It has a large number of parameters which can be set, including minimum match separation and so on. There's a well written paper explaining exactly how it works. Someone can provide a link I'm sure.

My biggest wish is for the robots to stop using consumer-grade electronics (the D-Link radio) in an industrial environment. It wasn't designed for the kinds of shock-loads and so on it receives in the hostile environment of an FRC bot, so it should come as no surprise that things like the power connector don't hold up terribly well to the abuse we put them through.

Einstein made it evident that we need to a) solve the FMS/robot comms issues, and b) have a much stronger plan in place for what to do when Einstein has systemic issues.

The people complaining about the CMP division size: get used to it. It will be the new norm unless they go to 8 divisions, which comes with the complication of where to put that many fields. We have reached a point now where the number of regionals qualifying teams to CMP completely fills the ~350team capacity CMP had pre-2012, and we're only adding MORE qualifying events with each passing year.

Better webcasts. Absolutely. A few this year, GKC, and GTREast, come to mind as having been pretty good. Perhaps better casting and archiving will come from the newfound Google partnership? After all, Google owns Youtube.

[Jon Stratis]

My negatives:
1. The bumper issues this year were horrible. Through all the weeks of regionals/districts, about half the teams at each event had bumper issues that needed to be fixed. That number is way to high to blame it all on the teams.
2. There was very little defense played at the regional level this year - for the most part, teams stayed on their half of the court and did their own thing. There were exceptions, but it made the game a little boring.
3. The game was a little more challenging than in past years, which I feel hurt the rookies. In the past, a kitbot could go in and do some good for a team, even if it's just driving to the other side and getting in the oppositions way. Not so with this year, as traversal of the field was non-trivial (despite how easy some teams made it appear!).
4. The Kinect has a great potential "coolness" factor that wasn't realized with this game. You didn't have long enough or accurate enough control to make it really useful during autonomous, and only letting one team on each alliance also limited its usefulness. This was something I really wanted to use this year, until I figured out we could do everything we wanted with a normal autonomous mode.

Some fixes for the above negatives:
1. FIRST has already stated they're getting a group together to go over the bumper rules for next year, and that group includes mentors and inspectors, the two groups of people that mater the most for this issue!
2. I'm not sure there's anything FIRST can do about this, other than to make sure we have a more balanced game next year!
3. I really feel that there needs to be something simple a team can do to materially benefit their alliance. I've been here for 6 years now, and tell tell you exactly what kitbots could do in every game up until now: Rack 'n Roll, they could play defense with little or no risk of penalties. Overdrive, they could do laps to score points. Lunacy, a good driver could avoid getting scored on. Breakaway, they could play defense fairly well just by getting in front of the goal. Logomotion, they could play defense really well just by pushing tubes to the sides and getting in the way. The game next year needs to include something for a simple kitbot to do!
4. The game needs to involve some way for the kinect to very clearly be superior. For example, in overdrive the balls were randomly positioned, and the hybrid remotes could, in theory, tell your robot where the ball actually was. The kinect gives us more control, so maybe take this same concept and make it 3 dimensional? What about allowing control of the robot through the kinect during teleop? There could be a portion of the field that isn't viewable from the driver station, but is from the kinect station - the human player can "take over" with the kinect in order to do something for some serious bonus points for their alliance.

[Alan Anderson]

VIMS needs a complete makeover from end to end. That doesn't mean just grafting additional functions onto the existing core.

[Craig Roys]

Having illuminated targets does not solve the problem that Don mentions. The retroreflective targets where just as easy to track (if not moreso) than self-illuminated targets...but in either case there is always the possibility that something off in the distance will be look the "same" to your vision system (in color if not in shape/size).

An opaque top backboard would have partially addressed this, and it's not like the audience seated behind the ends of the field was able to see anything anyhow.

I agree on the opaque backboard, but have to disagree about lit targets. You are neglecting the inverse square relationship between light intensity and distance. A reflective target forces the light to have to travel twice as far to reach the camera than a lit target (from robot to target and back to robot vs from target to robot), not to mention the fact that some of the light hitting the reflective tape will be scattered. Your target, being on the field, would almost surely be much closer to the camera than any other lighting in the venue making light from that target appear brighter than anything else. With a lit target, you could tune your camera to pick up only the brightest objects (your illuminated target) while ignoring most everything else. I would take a lit target in an arena filled with LED signs over retroreflective tape any day.

[Tetraman]

If someone posts a question, and you don't answer, and someone posts a more specific version of the question trying desperately to get some sort of a ruling, POST THE D@#N ANSWER. DO NOT say something like "we're not going to review your design" and then backtrack 6 weeks later. Along those lines, use common definitions of words and tell everyone what dictionary you're using, like Webster 7th Edition, so that all of us who aren't in the GDC can go look up the words and better determine how to design our robots until you answer our questions.


There are many, MANY reasons why the GDC doesn't answer certain questions on the Q&A, specifically about robot and mechanism designs. What the GDC didn't do was backtrack, they purely did what they should have done - avoided making a judgement on specific designs during build season, and then made a ruling during competition based on what was defined in the rule book. There were multiple choice words used in the Rule Book to explain what robots were unable to do, and all a dictionary would do is provide those same words back.


That said,

1. Allow for 'conversation' in the Q&A.
What I mean by this, is that a poster can respond to an answer they received within the same "thread" of questions. Rather than it being that a new question needs to be asked, but all questions relating to an answer can be grouped together and not separated by other questions.

2. Rules involving everything behind the player station walls need to be enforced and not ignored. Or, remove those kind of rules.
Example, the rules about the inbounders this year. Very rarely, at many events, these rules (don't step over lines, hold only 2, take out of corral asap) weren't enforced. Maybe in elimination matches the refs gave a little check that all was well, but for the most part, these rules didn't hold any ground.

3. Practice Rounds could be changed.
Instead of a list of matches that will be played by specific teams, have practice matches be first-come-first-served. This will only work best at regional and district events, not the championship; that said it makes more sense at regional/district events anyway. Have teams line up at que who wish to be qued up for a match and enter them in as they wish. Teams will still be required a time to connect to FMS on practice day, to ensure connectivity, but otherwise all teams that wish to forego their practice matches will then allow an extra team willing to join in a go.

4. Official FIRST Video Recording and Archive of all Competition matches, Alliance Selection. All Competitions webcasted by official FIRST staff/volunteers.
This, obviously, will take some time but it's so needed and pretty self explanatory. Done should be the days of teams having to volunteer coverage of events, and instead it be done officially at one website for all to see.

[coldfusion1279]

I think that the Q&A is the cause for a lot of gripes this year.

I would like to see it eliminated. They are digging themselves a deeper and deeper hole as FIRST grows. Seemed like the GDC couldn't keep up with aggregate thinking of the masses.

The rules should be clear enough to make the Q&A redundant.

[Steven Donow]

I think that the Q&A is the cause for a lot of gripes this year.

I would like to see it eliminated. They are digging themselves a deeper and deeper hole as FIRST grows. Seemed like the GDC couldn't keep up with aggregate thinking of the masses.

The rules should be clear enough to make the Q&A redundant.

While that is true, inevitably, some form of Q&A is needed because people are ALWAYS going to have questions about rules unless the GDC releases a manual with blue boxes for every single rule detailing every possible game/design scenario possible...


My grips this year are redundant to what's been said in the thread:

Comm issues: This one doesn't need to be discussed further.

Lack of a glossary: This year's manual needed it. In addition to the Q&A responses, it would have been nice to have definitions of things such as "grab/grasp/grapple" and "bridge" so that all the controversies with the rules wouldn't have happened.

[Travis Hoffman]

I totally disagree. The number of times alliances cooperated with each other is way higher than the number of times multiple teams conspired to hose a good team. Fact: this year, lots and lots of teams cooperated with each other to gain a mutual benefit. At least in the case of our team, that resulted in many positive interactions with teams that we otherwise wouldn't have had a chance to work together with. I'd guess that the GDC's "great intentions" ran at least partly along these lines.

Also, look at all of the teams that won #1 seeds this year. They are consistently really good teams who deserved to be there, and the number of exceptions doesn't seem much different to me than it has been in past years. This indicates to me that it was either not that common or not that easy for teams to collude and hurt the best teams' rankings.

I agree with this pretty much completely.

Don't let the inactions of a few overshadow the positive interactions of the many.

[Grim Tuesday]

My negatives:

3. I really feel that there needs to be something simple a team can do to materially benefit their alliance. I've been here for 6 years now, and tell tell you exactly what kitbots could do in every game up until now: Rack 'n Roll, they could play defense with little or no risk of penalties. Overdrive, they could do laps to score points. Lunacy, a good driver could avoid getting scored on. Breakaway, they could play defense fairly well just by getting in front of the goal. Logomotion, they could play defense really well just by pushing tubes to the sides and getting in the way. The game next year needs to include something for a simple kitbot to do!


If you build a small bot like 4334, (Archimedes champs) or 522 (NY Regional winner) you could be quite successful this year. A simple kitbot (on steroids) could balance on the bridges by following another team up, play "pushy pushy" defense or with a good driver, play "ball control defense". There was lots for a kitbot to do this year.

[Steven Donow]

If you build a small bot like 4334, (Archimedes champs) or 525 (NY Regional winner) you could be quite successful this year. A simple kitbot (on steroids) could balance on the bridges by following another team up, play "pushy pushy" defense or with a good driver, play "ball control defense". There was lots for a kitbot to do this year.

Agreed, this year there was really not much different a kitbot could do than in past years. In fact, because of balancing, it could be argued that a basic bot with no shooting or bridge mechanism would have more success than a basic bot last year that had no hanging or minibot deployment.

Also, it was 522 who won the NYC Regional/

[JuliaGreen]

Is this not standard? I know we picked up our Chairman's feedback from pit admin after awards were over. (At GSR). It is hugely helpful, pointing out our strengths, and the one thing we didn't touch on. We won EI and will push harder for RCA next year

We got feedback at our district event, but did not get feedback at the regional (Michigan State Champs) or CMP. We asked about feedback at the regional event but were told that the winning teams did not get feedback, because they won.

There's always room for improvement, even if you win.

Julia

[BigJ]

We got feedback at our district event, but did not get feedback at the regional (Michigan State Champs) or CMP. We asked about feedback at the regional event but were told that the winning teams did not get feedback, because they won.

There's always room for improvement, even if you win.

Julia

I know that we did get to receive ours last year when we won at Midwest. Weird.

[BrendanB]

I hope next year more field testing occurs before week 1 regionals. Our home regional of the Granite State Regional is week 1 and we were burned by balls stuck under the bridges and missed a lot of balances week 1 because we couldn't get the bridge down. Week 2 the panel was flipped and when we competed week 5 we had zero issues with balls under bridges. I thought the issue would have been fixed after our scrimmage that FIRST hosted but alas it was not. Not the end of the world but I don't know why they weren't steeper to begin with.

2. I agree with what people have said about the practice field at CMP. Even though I didn't attend this year it has been an issue in the past. 2011 especially with teams either testing auto, minibot, or scoring which was ineffective with a variety of testing on a field. I think it should be organized as follows: 2 full fields for wireless testing only. 2-4 large carpeted areas with several hoops and a lot of bridges. Maybe they could put these in two of the corners/along the back walls so it is out of the way. This would maximize practice as teams who want to run their robot to get more driver practice go to the field, teams who want to tune auto/their shooter and test balancing go to the carpeted areas.

3. Q&A needs to be much faster.

4. A little more clarification on bumpers rules and we are golden. "Exterior vertices" and the bumper numbers were vague to some teams.

5. Real time penalties is great, but having the emcee announce them after the match would be nice. I'm sure many team who didn't fully comprehend the rules didn't know they were committing them. It is nice that the match cycle is faster and specified unarguable rules are in place for silly items but if a team doesn't know they are committing something how will they get better?

As for the ball consistency this year, I know it sucks to have an inconsistency among balls, but when a company is mass producing a foam play ball they will vary and there is nothing we can do about it. Unless we want to pay double because they have to be tested. While annoying we took this into consideration with our robot so brand new or used, it still suck in from the key.

Overall, great season!

[Solidstate89]

As for the ball consistency this year, I know it sucks to have an inconsistency among balls, but when a company is mass producing a foam play ball they will vary and there is nothing we can do about it. Unless we want to pay double because they have to be tested. While annoying we took this into consideration with our robot so brand new or used, it still suck in from the key.

Our loader mechanism admittedly had some issues here and there with the new balls (something we just decided we had to deal with) compared to those that were used, but my problem (and also one raised by a couple others) is the fact that the balls they used in the Championships vs. at least the two regionals we attended were completely different. They weren't just new, they were a different batch entirely.

[BrendanB]

Our loader mechanism admittedly had some issues here and there with the new balls (something we just decided we had to deal with) compared to those that were used, but my problem (and also one raised by a couple others) is the fact that the balls they used in the Championships vs. at least the two regionals we attended were completely different. They weren't just new, they were a different batch entirely.

Either you could have played with used regional balls (believe me in week 5 they didn't have too much life left in them) or new balls? I think the choice is pretty clear with the championship event playing 150 matches on 4 fields.

Having worked in retail, manufacturers don't make a product constantly (unless it is an extremely popular item such as food or major electronics) manufacturers make items in batches of xxxx (say 2000 cases) so distributors can sell them to stores/retail chains to sell over time before a new batch is made. Right now we are placing an order for camping coolers for the summer and won't be able to get them again until next year. Something similar happened in 2009 when FIRST ordered the last of the manufacturers batch to cover what they needed but another batch wasn't going to be made for a while. FIRST probably had to make several large purchases over time which was divided up among regional fields, Andymark, and the KOP.

I agree with everyone that it would have been nice to have the exact same ball but it just isn't possible with how economics work.

/endbunnytrail

[efoote868]

Make sure people can see the field regardless of where they are in the stands.
On Galileo, this meant pushing the field away from the stands by about 10-15 feet. When people in front stood up, the field was covered. When they sat down, only the co-op bridge and beyond could be seen.

Open up the upper levels and have more seating available throughout the ENTIRE competition.

Allow more entrances to the Edward Jones Dome. Put them on opposite ends of the building.


Please explain intent in the rule books, especially on chains of rules. Just like you don't like us lawyering your rules, we don't like reading your minds only to find that we got it wrong.

[torihoelscher]

Alli, my sister mentioned (this year being her official freshman year) that the negative things she experienced was:

1) Teams not showing the values of FIRST during the competition.
2) Communication issues on the fields.

My own negatives are:

1) Not getting feedback from the Chairmans judges.
2) Teams rushing inside pretty much taking myself and my grandparents out while rushing for seating. I was not happy about people pretty much running us over.
3) The seating of Einstein and the opening Ceremonies.
4) Cannot see Einstein on either left or right in the stands
5) Could not see any of the matches from the Pits.
6) The smoking area. (Im sorry, I am allergic to smoke)
7) Teams not being Gracious to each other and to other people.


These are all minor things, I loved the closing ceremonies and the Finale!

I LOVE FIRST WITH ALL MY <3

[Joon Park]

I agree with:

The Einstein seating hassle. That was kind of ridiculous. If they had opened up the upper levels beforehand, as they should've been able to easily predict their necessity, perhaps all that walking up and down and around the dome wouldn't have happened for our team.

The FMS problems. I don't think I need to add much else to that.

Also, one thing that our veteran members really missed was the Glossary in the rules. The manual in general was smaller this year, and while being succinct is great, the lack of definitions really brought up too much ambiguity.

I asked Bill Miller and some GDC members at FRC Live! during Champs, and Bill's justification was that they made the rules shorter so that teams who don't read them actually would. I did not agree with that method. Don't get me wrong, I approve of shorter rules as long as they are clear and specific. But the reason they provided did not bode well for me. Teams should read the rules, 5 pages or 500 pages, and those who don't should take what comes to them because of it.

One of the GDC members also stated that the glossary was removed in fear of creating a rule within the definition. I don't agree with that answer either. I believe the usefulness of the glossary outweighs that issue. I believe the usefulness of the glossary outweighs a lot of things. In short, we'd really like the glossary back.

[lemiant]

Kill the speeches on Einstein. After we won our division I sent the webcast link to a bunch of people and along with the field issues the sheer number of speeches made it remarkably uninteresting. If you want to make it consumable to a larger audience it has to be interesting. I recommend a separate awards ceremony and far fewer speeches.

[Camren]

I, personally, would like to see FIRST stray away from games where game piece deterioration isn't such a huge factor, but I know what pretty much impossible. But I can wish.

Those are pretty much my gripes. Nothing too extreme. Just some logistical stuff.

Funny thing about that suggestion. Team 3081 roboeagles seemed to be one of the few who considered that variable which is why we went with a catapult design.

[Koko Ed]

The Coop award made no sense at all. I bet there was nobody at most regionals that could even explain how it was determined.

It's the "At Least You Found Your Way to the Field. Here's a Medal" Award.

[pfreivald]

Kill the speeches on Einstein. After we won our division I sent the webcast link to a bunch of people and along with the field issues the sheer number of speeches made it remarkably uninteresting. If you want to make it consumable to a larger audience tit has to be interesting. I recommend a separate awards ceremony and far fewer speeches.

That's a common complaint every year -- and I couldn't agree more. I have no idea how a group of geniuses intent on making STEM exciting for the masses so consistently make the final championship games so painfully boring!

(That is to say, the matches themselves are generally great, but the speeches are so numerous and so long that the overall Einstein spectator experience is downright tedious.)

[Joon Park]

Funny thing about that suggestion. Team 3081 roboeagles seemed to be one of the few who considered that variable which is why we went with a catapult design.

Actually, from what I gathered at regionals/champs, quite a few teams considered the variable. It's just that very few teams actually built to account for it.

I know I was skeptical during week 1 about the ball deterioration being a huge factor, I was proven dead wrong during shooter testing. We then spent the rest of the season, right up until the championship, trying to build a ball compression tester that would account for that. We never got it to work.

[IndySam]

Funny thing about that suggestion. Team 3081 roboeagles seemed to be one of the few who considered that variable which is why we went with a catapult design.

Couldn't agree with you more. In our early testing we discovered the variability would be a huge problem. That's why we went with our fling-a-pult and it was never a problem for us.

[jblay]

The field sketches need to be more similar to the field with parts of the field that robots react off of, or at least include some optional sketches that are closer to the actual field. So many teams couldn't lower the bridge at the start of the season and had a shooter designed for the backboard in the sketches and then missed shots that went too hard off of the backboard on the actual field.

[Cory]

That's a common complaint every year -- and I couldn't agree more. I have no idea how a group of geniuses intent on making STEM exciting for the masses so consistently make the final championship games so painfully boring!

(That is to say, the matches themselves are generally great, but the speeches are so numerous and so long that the overall Einstein spectator experience is downright tedious.)

It was worse before.

In 2002 and prior when at Epcot Einstein was played through to completion, at which point there was a 2.5 hour long award ceremony in 100* heat with everyone looking forward to going to Disney as soon as the awards were over.

At least now the teams get time between matches to fix any breakdowns, let the robots cool, etc. The real problem is the content that FIRST is choosing to fill that dead space with, not the existence of it.

[pfreivald]

The field sketches need to be more similar to the field with parts of the field that robots react off of, or at least include some optional sketches that are closer to the actual field. So many teams couldn't lower the bridge at the start of the season and had a shooter designed for the backboard in the sketches and then missed shots that went too hard off of the backboard on the actual field.

A lesson that all teams should take to heart about everything: all values are nominal.

[Marc S.]

About the Q&A system...

FIRST needs to answer all questions even if they are design specific. The ONLY reason a team would ask a design specific question is because they don't know whether or not their design is legal. No team should ever have to build part of their robot (or even worse their whole robot) wondering if it is going to be ruled legal or illegal at their first event.

This year 973 was debating doing something similar to the '118' style hang off the bridge. We considered this because there was not a definition to the 'Grab, Grasp, Grapple' rule in the manual. When we looked up definitions for grab, grasp, and grapple we found multiples of each, and most of them classified 118's hanging mechanism legal. Even most of the definitions for grapple (http://www.definitions.net/definition/grapple) don't classify a grappling hook as something that grapples. Because of this we thought we needed clarification by the Q&A. After they failed to answer our initial question, we submitted 3 question: (1) Please define Grab. (2) Please define Grasp. (3) Please define Grapple.

The answers they gave were mediocre: "If a reasonably astute observer would define something as (insert one of the G's) then it is (that same G).

The problem with this is that 'reasonably astute observers' don't always define stuff the same. So essentially they were saying that at some events the 118 style hang is legal... and at some, it is not. This is not only unfair it degrades the image of FIRST. (It also makes for some very frustrated designers in the middle of build season.)


There's also the bridge thing, where FIRST defined the bridge as everything in the bridge assembly picture (including the ball deflector), twice in week 2 of build (which even I thought was strange cause the first thing I thought of was, hey if we go under the bridge then we're still supported by it and we still get points for it). Then in week 6 they redefined the bridge as only the moving/balancing part. So essentially this told me that, the answers in the FIRST Q&A are not official and we should not make design decisions based on Q&A answers. Again this degrades FIRST's image, and can potentially ruin a teams' season.

/end Q&A rant

[rzoeller]

Funny thing about that suggestion. Team 3081 roboeagles seemed to be one of the few who considered that variable which is why we went with a catapult design.

We ended up going with a shooter, but used a force transducer to account for the variability in all but the most extreme situations. We read the force returned as the ball rolled across it and used it to modify a base speed.

[Ross3098]

Our loader mechanism admittedly had some issues here and there with the new balls (something we just decided we had to deal with) compared to those that were used, but my problem (and also one raised by a couple others) is the fact that the balls they used in the Championships vs. at least the two regionals we attended were completely different. They weren't just new, they were a different batch entirely.

Same situation for our robot. Not a SINGLE problem with picking up balls through 2 districts and MSC. The balls introduced on Saturday before/during division elims were unbearable. Our intake jammed almost every time we tried to pick one of those up.

The new balls introduced were way different. After our last qualification match on Saturday we left the ball that jammed us in the robot. Normal balls we had used all season allowed ~1-2 inches of compression from squeezing. The ball that jammed us... 1/4 inch if we were trying...

I wish FIRST would have chosen a game piece that they have readily available for the entire season (Each object has the same consistency when new.) and will not change teams' ability to play the game as the season progresses.

[rsisk]

I missed the Web Hug :(

[Gray Adams]

About the Q&A system...

FIRST needs to answer all questions even if they are design specific. The ONLY reason a team would ask a design specific question is because they don't know whether or not their design is legal. No team should ever have to build part of their robot (or even worse their whole robot) wondering if it is going to be ruled legal or illegal at their first event.

This year 973 was debating doing something similar to the '118' style hang off the bridge. We considered this because there was not a definition to the 'Grab, Grasp, Grapple' rule in the manual. When we looked up definitions for grab, grasp, and grapple we found multiples of each, and most of them classified 118's hanging mechanism legal. Even most of the definitions for grapple (http://www.definitions.net/definition/grapple) don't classify a grappling hook as something that grapples. Because of this we thought we needed clarification by the Q&A. After they failed to answer our initial question, we submitted 3 question: (1) Please define Grab. (2) Please define Grasp. (3) Please define Grapple.

The answers they gave were mediocre: "If a reasonably astute observer would define something as (insert one of the G's) then it is (that same G).

The problem with this is that 'reasonably astute observers' don't always define stuff the same. So essentially they were saying that at some events the 118 style hang is legal... and at some, it is not. This is not only unfair it degrades the image of FIRST. (It also makes for some very frustrated designers in the middle of build season.)


I have to ask, what did you think they were trying to disallow when they specified grab, grasp, and grapple?

[PayneTrain]

I've seen a lot of problems, but the big one for me was: dedicated webcasts. We should not have to resort to a team maybe stepping up to hopefully get a stream out to people. Please get the infrastructure for that to work at all events! It was really unfortunate that I had to tell sponsors back at home that I would only be able to maybe get emails out to them since the feed was down.

FIRST, if we're trying to impress giant companies who are new to the organization, the ability for executives to watch the event when they want to is very important. At our home regional, our sponsors came out and checked out the event, but in NC, no cast at all... it was a PR nightmare that I had to find energy to deal with.

[Andrew Lawrence]

Having the gamepieces made by more than one place (there were some made in one manufacturer, and some made in another. Balls we bought week 1 were drastically different from balls we bought week 8, and that is after heavy testing of both balls being freshly opened and unused).

That really messed up shooting for most teams.


Replacing balls. While one thinks it's logical to replace old balls with new ones, the new ones were again drastically different than the old ones, resulting in wheeled shooters misfiring almost every time in eliminations. I think a game piece like the balls this year had too much variability for teams to control. Game pieces like the soccer balls in 2010, the moon rocks in 2009 (for the most part), the trackballs of 2008, etc. had little to no variability between them, so going from one to another wouldn't change performance.


Coopertition bridge. Great addition to the game, worth too much. I like the idea of a coop bridge, because working with your opponents is much harder than working with your allies. Because of this, there is a reward. Plus, you have to sacrifice one of your team mates who could spend their time scoring, so the tradeoff seems good enough for the mutual benefit. The part I don't like, however, is how much it decided regionals. I understand it's supposed to be a part of the game, but to go to the point to say that you can loose and still "win" is too far. If you loose, you loose. Don't try and over-glorify winning, and cushion loosing. I think the best solution is to make the coop bridge worth 1 point. Not quite a win, but enough to benefit the winning team a little, and benefit the loosing team for putting a robot up to benefit the other team. Rankings won't be drastically affected, and coopertition will remain a part of the game.


Events. The events, while awesome, are getting too crowded. While the idea of moving to district systems is being talked about, it needs to be done soon. Teams are having trouble getting into regional events. I know personally here in CA we wanted to sign up for Sacramento, and were forced into Central Valley because Sacramento had no room. Not a terrible thing, but as FIRST expands at the exponential rate it does, I think we're going to need to be able to contain those teams as fast and efficiently as possible.


That's all my complaints. No more until next year.

[Marc S.]

I have to ask, what did you think they were trying to disallow when they specified grab, grasp, and grapple?

That's just it, other than to prevent robots from grabbing onto the hoops and preventing field damage, we didn't know. If they had clarified it in the game manual we would have known. Maybe a rule along the line of:

R118) A robot may not be supported by the bridge in more than 1 way, AKA a robot gaining leverage on the bridge from 2 or more different parts of the bridge.

However that in itself would have cause some upsets with many balances this season. Either way there were many teams who were unclear about the grab, grasp, grapple rule.

[Libby K]

4. Official FIRST Video Recording and Archive of all Competition matches, Alliance Selection. All Competitions webcasted by official FIRST staff/volunteers.
This, obviously, will take some time but it's so needed and pretty self explanatory. Done should be the days of teams having to volunteer coverage of events, and instead it be done officially at one website for all to see.

I'm certainly not disagreeing with the need for better webcasts. My only question is... where is FIRST going to find the staff members to cover this? They're already stretched incredibly thin as it is...

Editing to add this, instead of double posting:

Kill the speeches on Einstein. After we won our division I sent the webcast link to a bunch of people and along with the field issues the sheer number of speeches made it remarkably uninteresting. If you want to make it consumable to a larger audience it has to be interesting. I recommend a separate awards ceremony and far fewer speeches.

I'm a little confused. Most of those 'speakers' were award presentations. As one of them, we're instructed: Go up, read script, come back down. They're exactly the same scripts read by the emcees at regionals. When would you rather they give the non-division-specific awards?

Yes, there are speeches from Dean/Jon/Woodie, etc, and I'm not arguing that some of those can go a little long, at all. I'm just wondering where else the regular award presentations could go.

[Gray Adams]

That's just it, other than to prevent robots from grabbing onto the hoops and preventing field damage, we didn't know. If they had clarified it in the game manual we would have known. Maybe a rule along the line of:

R118) A robot may not be supported by the bridge in more than 1 way, AKA a robot gaining leverage on the bridge from 2 or more different parts of the bridge.

However that in itself would have cause some upsets with many balances this season. Either way there were many teams who were unclear about the grab, grasp, grapple rule.

Even that is confusing. Would you define one "part" of the bridge to be the aluminum angle, and thus reacting against both faces of that part is still legal?

The GDC has the difficult position of creating a brand new game which has no precedent for most rules. In all other sports, questionable activity can often be justified and deemed illegal by past instances of it being attempted.

The Q&A is pretty terrible at remedying this pre-competition, but it seems like they try to stay as vague as possible to encourage as much creativity as possible. The last thing they want to do is encourage a certain strategy (which would explain the ridiculousness of all the robots in the video).

I'm not really sure what the best thing to do would be. Creating crystal clear definitions would be nice, but that's very difficult, and is still subjective. Maybe the GDC just shouldn't worry about encouraging or discouraging designs when they respond to the Q&A.

[IndySam]

Having the gamepieces made by more than one place (there were some made in one manufacturer, and some made in another. Balls we bought week 1 were drastically different from balls we bought week 8, and that is after heavy testing of both balls being freshly opened and unused).

As far as I know the balls were all from the same manufacture and the same lot. Do you have proof otherwise?

[sircedric4]

That's a common complaint every year -- and I couldn't agree more. I have no idea how a group of geniuses intent on making STEM exciting for the masses so consistently make the final championship games so painfully boring!

(That is to say, the matches themselves are generally great, but the speeches are so numerous and so long that the overall Einstein spectator experience is downright tedious.)

I am pretty sure the reason they do speeches during Einstein is to give the robots a chance to cool down and for the teams to perform maintenance/battery changes on the robots between matches.

So its either speeches that are gonna be made one way or the other, or another 5 minutes of dancing to Cotton Eye Joe.

[thefro526]

I'm certainly not disagreeing with the need for better webcasts. My only question is... where is FIRST going to find the staff members to cover this? They're already stretched incredibly thin as it is...



Doesn't FIRST Contract an AV Company for Non-District Events? Wouldn't it be as simple as asking them (and compensating them appropriately) to webcast and archive the event?

Breaking the video into individual matches would be a little more involved - but if it's something truly important to FIRST then it's probably worth hiring a person or two that manages these archived videos - even if they're only two to three month Temp employees for the competition season.

[Alan Anderson]

As far as I know the balls were all from the same manufacture and the same lot.

The side of very single box of balls I ever looked at bore the label "box n of 1,111". It's possible that they were from separate production runs, but they were obviously all shipped at the same time.

[techhelpbb]

I'm certainly not disagreeing with the need for better webcasts. My only question is... where is FIRST going to find the staff members to cover this? They're already stretched incredibly thin as it is...


Only half joking with this....

We're a robotics competition with robots that have boom arms?
I once showed Team 11's boom arm robot to a video webcasting company and they were MIGHTY interested in getting close to it. I think someone might be able to put 2 and 2 together with that.

We're also a competition with fields we provide. Fields that could be outfitted with video equipment that is stationary.

Still have equipment cost and setup time, but it doesn't all have to be cinematic wizardry.

[rees2001]

1) Follow and enforce the rules that are in place. If teams are expected to follow the rules, as should field personnel, inspectors, and volunteers.
2) Don't ignore the students.
Multiple times our students questioned a situation that did not agree with rules and procedures published, and were either ridiculed or ignored.
Respect from the field personnel is a huge one for me. At one of our regional competitions the announcer saw a ref make an incorrect call in regards to driving through the key being a penalty. He commented on it in his play by play and the ref changed his call. This was after 4 straight matches a student tried to alert the head ref that the penalty was being called incorrectly by that ref and they were all ignored.
At championship my students were told by the head ref that since we designed our bumpers to be at the lowest position we designed it so other teams could drive onto us and that it is our fault that our robot was damaged by the other robot driving into our robot. He actually told the student that “it is pretty funny how they drove into you.” Unacceptable!

A few things:
Someone mentioned earlier in the thread the matchmaking algorithm. It patently doesn't suck. It's a very complex multidimensional matrix problem, and it does a very good job at producing a 'fair' schedule. It makes an assumption that all teams are equal in power, and thus, a given schedule will be 'harder' or 'easier' for some teams. It has a large number of parameters which can be set, including minimum match separation and so on. There's a well written paper explaining exactly how it works. Someone can provide a link I'm sure.

It was me that commented on the schedule. I know it doesn’t “suck”. I know it is difficult to put together. I was told by a reliable source that he ran some data and our team had the toughest schedule at championship. I suppose somebody has to get the toughest schedule, but it would seem like it would be someone that ends up ranked in the bottom ¼ not the top 1/3.

I would also agree with the posters that felt there should have been a glossary and better Q&A responses. Please just answer the questions like you are responding to a stakeholder in your organization, because you are.

I have posted in the positive thread, how about you?

[Jared Russell]

On the topic of balls...

There is no doubt in my mind that the balls introduced for Eliminations on Saturday were significantly different than any other balls we had played with all season. Our team had been to four District and Regional events prior to Championships, and the balls we encountered at all four (and the first two days on Curie) were relatively the same. Sure, there was a bit of variability from one ball to the next, and new balls always came out for Eliminations, but once we dialed in our shooter we never had to do it again (astute observers will notice that Miss Daisy's accuracy always degraded a bit towards the end of Qualifications at all of our events, but suddenly got a lot better in Eliminations. We tuned our shooter for Elimination balls and deliberately did not play the game of trying to react to old balls, since we knew the rounds that counted would have new ones).

After lunch, however, the balls that were put out felt SIGNIFICANTLY different. Not only were they somewhat squishier, their surface texture was very different than what we had seen before. In fact, the balls felt a LOT like the balls our team had purchased directly from Gopher (without the FIRST logo) right after kickoff. We ended up ditching the manufacturer's balls simply because they handled so much differently from the FIRST-logo balls.

We and many other teams had difficulty handling the new balls. They stuck to each other and just about any other surface they touched like no other balls did. I observed or have heard about AT LEAST the following teams having some sort of jamming or shooting accuracy problems during Eliminations: 341, 987, 1986, 254, 1477, 330. The most common culprit was that balls would "climb" each other in conveyor systems, or not want to funnel from N-to-1 between intakes and feeder systems. In other cases, the increased "stickiness" of the balls caused them to drag significantly in single-file conveyors.

Were these balls from the same batch? I do not know, but I doubt it. If they were, perhaps they were stored in environmental conditions that changed the surface texture of the balls (FIRST really needs to invest in a game-piece humidor :] ). I just wish they would have introduced the balls earlier so that teams could have reacted.

[Clinton Bolinger]

I'm certainly not disagreeing with the need for better webcasts. My only question is... where is FIRST going to find the staff members to cover this? They're already stretched incredibly thin as it is...


Doesn't FIRST Contract an AV Company for Non-District Events? Wouldn't it be as simple as asking them (and compensating them appropriately) to webcast and archive the event?

Breaking the video into individual matches would be a little more involved - but if it's something truly important to FIRST then it's probably worth hiring a person or two that manages these archived videos - even if they're only two to three month Temp employees for the competition season.


Our team has been archiving match videos in Michigan for 2 years now. We have each match uploaded to YouTube with in 5 minutes after the match is over. We also add tags to each match that has the team numbers (frc2337 (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=frc2337&search=tag)) that are playing in the match, as well as, an exact match tag (2012gl_qf4m2 (http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=2012gl_qf4m2&search=tag))

What we use to pull this off:
- 1 Person
- 1 Laptop
- Internet
- Video and Audio Feed

I feel that if a medium size team can do this at events they attend, FIRST should be able to pull this off even easier. FIRST has access to the FMS, internet, and Video Feeds allowing for them to automate the system even more. Also I think one of the 20 volunteers that guard the entrance to the pits, watching for people with out safety glasses, could easily perform this task.

If FIRST wants more people to see what we are doing, I think that archive all of the matches for all of the events on YouTube is a step in the right direction.

If anyone at FIRST would like to talk to use about how we archive matches we would be more then happy to share what we have learned.

-Clinton-

[pfreivald]

I am pretty sure the reason they do speeches during Einstein is to give the robots a chance to cool down and for the teams to perform maintenance/battery changes on the robots between matches.

So its either speeches that are gonna be made one way or the other, or another 5 minutes of dancing to Cotton Eye Joe.

I remain... unconvinced that robots need more cool-down and battery change time on Einstein then they do during division (or regional) tournaments. 2+ hours to play at most six 2.25-minute matches is more than a bit much. If you don't have a personal investment in a team on the field, the finals are downright boring.

Please note that I'm not saying this to whine, I'm saying it as a suggested improvement if FIRST truly wants to become a popular culture, spectator phenomenon that actually transforms the culture. FIRST has clearly embraced the realization that the games themselves must be fun to watch even for people who are not on a team; they just need to apply the same reasoning to Einstein.

IMO, of course.

[Jim Zondag]

On the topic of balls...

There is no doubt in my mind that the balls introduced for Eliminations on Saturday were significantly different than any other balls we had played with all season.

Team 33 experienced the same thing on Galileo. We thought that the new balls put in for Elims felt very different and our alliance missed most of the Hybrid shots.
The error appear larger than what we had seen before at any of the other events, so it did seem that these ball may have been 'more different'. There will always be variables outside of the control of the teams, and playing peice variablity is always one of these. I think that dealing with ball variablitity was our biggest challenge in developing the robot this year.

[Craig Roys]

Team 33 experienced the same thing on Galileo. We thought that the new balls put in for Elims felt very different and our alliance missed most of the Hybrid shots.
The error appear larger than what we had seen before at any of the other events, so it did seem that these ball may have been 'more different'. There will always be variables outside of the control of the teams, and playing peice variablity is always one of these. I think that dealing with ball variablitity was our biggest challenge in developing the robot this year.

We dealt with the same issue. Prior to the Galileo eliminations, we were able to deal with new balls being cycled in - we had the ability to slow down our shooter from the driver station, plus we got a pretty good idea of where we needed to park with new balls. The new balls on Galileo went much further than any others we experienced - this was with the shooter turned down and parked at the very back of the key. Not to mention that we knelt on, jumped up and down on, compressed the balls as much as possible before the match - didn't seem to do much good.

We have a couple of things that we want to try for the offseason to try to get more consistency between new and old balls. We'll probably get it figured out just as all the competitions are over and we need to start planning for next year.

[Thad House]

On Archimedes towards the ends of the qualifications there were some VERY HARD balls put onto the field. With out hands they were uncompressable. During the match we grabbed it, and it got jammed in our shooter because it couldnt compress. and shut down our shooting that match

[Craig Roys]

After lunch, however, the balls that were put out felt SIGNIFICANTLY different. Not only were they somewhat squishier, their surface texture was very different than what we had seen before. In fact, the balls felt a LOT like the balls our team had purchased directly from Gopher (without the FIRST logo) right after kickoff. We ended up ditching the manufacturer's balls simply because they handled so much differently from the FIRST-logo balls.

We and many other teams had difficulty handling the new balls. They stuck to each other and just about any other surface they touched like no other balls did. I observed or have heard about AT LEAST the following teams having some sort of jamming or shooting accuracy problems during Eliminations: 341, 987, 1986, 254, 1477, 330. The most common culprit was that balls would "climb" each other in conveyor systems, or not want to funnel from N-to-1 between intakes and feeder systems. In other cases, the increased "stickiness" of the balls caused them to drag significantly in single-file conveyors.

Were these balls from the same batch? I do not know, but I doubt it. If they were, perhaps they were stored in environmental conditions that changed the surface texture of the balls (FIRST really needs to invest in a game-piece humidor :] ). I just wish they would have introduced the balls earlier so that teams could have reacted.

We noticed the "climbing" during our last match of quals on Saturday morning...we pulled 2 balls off the alliance bridge and they came in right next to each other. When we tried to shoot they jammed up - normally we could fix this by reversing the rollers, but they just jammed in that direction too. It took us 30-45 seconds to finally de-jam them so we could shoot again. By then it was time to head to the coop bridge. It did seem they were more sticky or something.

[mwmac]

Stick + dead horse = this post...Names of involved parties will not be revealed, they can speak for themselves if they wish to jump in...

Just prior to the beginning of our elimination matches a team approached us in the pits to show us a ball that had just jammed in their bot on the Newton field. It was a slightly different shade of orange (no problem), felt significantly firmer (problem?), significantly different in surface friction characteristics (problem?) and, according to the team with the ball, weighed 2+ oz more than the kop balls. Our physical comparisons were to a brand new ball purchased at the First store. Both balls were taken to First officiating personnel for explanation of the change in balls. We were then advised that a mixture of both type of balls would be used in elims in approximately a 50/50 mix.

No bellyaching or crybabies here but we did experience our first ball jams of the champs in eliminations, one in hybrid and one in teleop. In quali's we had almost 100% 4 ball hybrid to this point. We were able to clear one jam the other rendered us unable to shoot for the remainder of the match.

Purpose of the post is to confirm from personal observation that balls introduced in elims were significantly different in key characteristics and to urge First to address this matter in the future.

Ball horse is well and truly dead to this observer...:)

[rsisk]

I wish they would bring back the opening parade at Championship. It last happened in 2010 in Atlanta (IIRC).

All of the mascots, and high school bands would march around the arena and really just pump the energy levels about a million times. It was a pretty cool way to open the event.

[BJC]

Team 33 experienced the same thing on Galileo. We thought that the new balls put in for Elims felt very different and our alliance missed most of the Hybrid shots.
The error appear larger than what we had seen before at any of the other events, so it did seem that these ball may have been 'more different'. There will always be variables outside of the control of the teams, and playing peice variablity is always one of these. I think that dealing with ball variablitity was our biggest challenge in developing the robot this year.

Jim, don't forget the elim's match where we had a ball jam up in the collector. (which had never happened before.) I thought it was just really bad luck at the time, but now I think it could have been that the balls were actually different from the rest of the season.

[Mr B]

Something I haven't seen posted here is the issue of Bag and Tag robots. Well funded teams simply build two robots, one for competition and one for practice and software development. Teams with less cabbage have to make do with a single robot, and hope that they can make it work at the event. (That or bend the rules and keep working after ship. Given the sheer number of teams, it likely happens.) If we lose the bag and tag requirements, things are greatly simplified, and up-and-comers can be more competitive. Yes, there will be teams that will change their whole robot between events, but the overall quality of competition will skyrocket.

[techhelpbb]

Something I haven't seen posted here is the issue of Bag and Tag robots. Well funded teams simply build two robots, one for competition and one for practice and software development. Teams with less cabbage have to make do with a single robot, and hope that they can make it work at the event. (That or bend the rules and keep working after ship. Given the sheer number of teams, it likely happens.) If we lose the bag and tag requirements, things are greatly simplified, and up-and-comers can be more competitive. Yes, there will be teams that will change their whole robot between events, but the overall quality of competition will skyrocket.

The other problem with the bag and tag system is that at MAR Mount Olive our entire supply of bags and tags in spare parts was 1. I would know, I was the guy in charge of the spare parts at the event.

That made for a nice close to the event as teams realized that when their robot got to the next event they'd not have the 'official' bag or tags.

It resulted in not one, but two calls to FIRST HQ to make absolutely sure that they'd not get caught in paperwork on that when they got to the other end.

[apalrd]

Something I haven't seen posted here is the issue of Bag and Tag robots. Well funded teams simply build two robots, one for competition and one for practice and software development. Teams with less cabbage have to make do with a single robot, and hope that they can make it work at the event. (That or bend the rules and keep working after ship. Given the sheer number of teams, it likely happens.) If we lose the bag and tag requirements, things are greatly simplified, and up-and-comers can be more competitive. Yes, there will be teams that will change their whole robot between events, but the overall quality of competition will skyrocket.

+1

Making improvements (mechanical, software, driver) is very hard with only a few hours of development. Practice robots make this significantly easier.

[AdamHeard]

I'm certainly not disagreeing with the need for better webcasts. My only question is... where is FIRST going to find the staff members to cover this? They're already stretched incredibly thin as it is...

Editing to add this, instead of double posting:



A well run, easy to use, webcast and archive system would be HUGE for spreading FIRST.

Do you know how horribly difficult it is to get parents, teachers, sponsors, etc... to watch a webcast? Assuming they can even get it open/running, then they have to deal with often subpar quality, and finally then they are often clueless to who we are and where our robot is.

You should be able to go to watchfirst.com, type in a team number, a video stream pops up and says "Team XYZ will play in 4 matches and approximately 19 minutes!"

I can dream....

[BigJ]

A well run, easy to use, webcast and archive system would be HUGE for spreading FIRST.

Do you know how horribly difficult it is to get parents, teachers, sponsors, etc... to watch a webcast? Assuming they can even get it open/running, then they have to deal with often subpar quality, and finally then they are often clueless to who we are and where our robot is.

You should be able to go to watchfirst.com, type in a team number, a video stream pops up and says "Team XYZ will play in 4 matches and approximately 19 minutes!"

I can dream....

I have never thought of querying for a stream by team number. That's a good idea. It's not terribly complex to scrape a list of teams for each event for the week.

[Ryan Dognaux]

A well run, easy to use, webcast and archive system would be HUGE for spreading FIRST.

Do you know how horribly difficult it is to get parents, teachers, sponsors, etc... to watch a webcast? Assuming they can even get it open/running, then they have to deal with often subpar quality, and finally then they are often clueless to who we are and where our robot is.

You should be able to go to watchfirst.com, type in a team number, a video stream pops up and says "Team XYZ will play in 4 matches and approximately 19 minutes!"

I can dream....

This would be huge. Parents have no clue where to go to watch an FRC webcast. Heck, sometimes I have a hard time finding all of them. Madstream has made this much easier this year, so kudos to them for making a one-stop shop for FRC webcasts (that we can view simultaneously!)

With video streaming technology to the point that it is, it should be fairly easy to do this. UStream or justin.tv make it so you only need two things - an internet connection and a camera. Get the output video feed that's running to the projector to also feed to a PC, get the audio levels adjusted and you're golden. UStream will even automatically archive it for you, I think. This would take one volunteer with a little training on how to use it, nothing more.

[couvillion]

I am going to make two suggestions.

One of the main lessons I repeat to kids is you can't debug what you can't see. FIRST need to take this to heart with it's FMS, I would suggest ethernet data loggers and or back channel comunication box that is attached to each robot on the field, it will tell you if that robot is getting packets and allow problems with the field to be debugged. That data should be shared with the teams so that everyone knows what happened.

Two some form of tiered competition. Different teams have different resources and the obvious soulution would be to allow some teams to skip bag and tag and compete against other teams that did the same. They probably shouldn't go to St Louis even if they do well cause they have money and people problem. Maybe they should be limited to one regional or such. But know you have a decent robot but lack the resources to pull it off is frustrating to (a/mine) team. I do think they should compete in the same time and place as the top tier teams because there is deal that can be learned simply with a few minute to talk with a top tier team.

I think FIRST is a great asset for exposing kids to engineering and I think that FRC is a wonderful competition because of the compressed schedule but it threatens to overwhelm the smaller teams.

[kmehta]

A well run, easy to use, webcast and archive system would be HUGE for spreading FIRST.

You should be able to go to watchfirst.com, type in a team number, a video stream pops up and says "Team XYZ will play in 4 matches and approximately 19 minutes!"

I can dream....

TheBlueAlliance/MadStream is currently working on this, we're actually working on a full overhaul of the TBA user interface.

Heck, sometimes I have a hard time finding all of them. Madstream has made this much easier this year, so kudos to them for making a one-stop shop for FRC webcasts (that we can view simultaneously!)

With video streaming technology to the point that it is, it should be fairly easy to do this. UStream or justin.tv make it so you only need two things - an internet connection and a camera. Get the output video feed that's running to the projector to also feed to a PC, get the audio levels adjusted and you're golden. UStream will even automatically archive it for you, I think. This would take one volunteer with a little training on how to use it, nothing more.

EugeneF wrote a pretty nice guide (http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/2012_Webcasting_%26_Archiving) before the season which outlines the easiest and cheapest way to run and archive a webcast.
But one of the main problems we ran into issues with justintv blocking us (and a few other regionals) for broadcasting copyrighted music, even though FIRST has licenses for all the music.

[BigJ]

TheBlueAlliance/MadStream is currently working on this, we're actually working on a full overhaul of the TBA user interface.



EugeneF wrote a pretty nice guide (http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/2012_Webcasting_%26_Archiving) before the season which outlines the easiest and cheapest way to run and archive a webcast.
But one of the main problems we ran into issues with justintv blocking us (and a few other regionals) for broadcasting copyrighted music, even though FIRST has licenses for all the music.

I watch a lot of streams on Twitch.tv (video game streaming site) which used to be or is owned by the same company as Justin.tv (Twitch.tv just got bought by CBS Interactive so I don't know if this is still true) and their admins are very friendly and supportive of all channels. Maybe FIRST and the community can get in touch with the administrators of Justin or Twitch to make sure the licenses are known and approved for X, Y, Z channels on A, B, C dates.

I think FIRST regionals are "technological" and "gamey" enough to be appropriate on Twitch but that would be a question for their admins I guess.

(I know the madstream chat was running on Twitch because I could do the twitch emoticons http://i.imgur.com/eYHF9.png)

[Kimmeh]

The Coop award made no sense at all. I bet there was nobody at most regionals that could even explain how it was determined.

Truth. My team won it at the Livonia District in FiM. The other mentors and I had to look it up once we got back to the bleachers.

The Coopertition™ Award celebrates the team that best demonstrates the greatest level of Coopertition™ during the event, based on their performance on the field.

We're not sure if it's based off the number of points one gets or if that's just a factor. For what it's worth, we had the highest coopertition score at the event...

[BigJ]

Truth. My team won it at the Livonia District in FiM. The other mentors and I had to look it up once we got back to the bleachers.



We're not sure if it's based off the number of points one gets or if that's just a factor. For what it's worth, we had the highest coopertition score at the event...

Here's the criteria:

To determine the winner of the Cooperition Award, the FMS will rank all teams in decreasing order, using the following sorting criteria:

1st Order Sort 2 x Coopertition Score - Qualification Score
2nd Order Sort Coopertition Score

The team or teams receiving the top ranking after both sorts will receive the Coopertition Award.

[Ryan Dognaux]

EugeneF wrote a pretty nice guide (http://www.firstwiki.net/index.php/2012_Webcasting_%26_Archiving) before the season which outlines the easiest and cheapest way to run and archive a webcast.

I remember finding this before week 1, it's a great guide that spells things out pretty easily if you have any knowledge of video and audio. I especially liked the effort to standardize the naming of the videos at each event.

It just seems like we are behind the curve when it comes to making our events watchable outside of being at the venue itself. Other than the abundance of webcasts increasing over the years, the delivery is still pretty much the same.

[pfreivald]

We're not sure if it's based off the number of points one gets or if that's just a factor. For what it's worth, we had the highest coopertition score at the event...

It's been a little strange since its inception. We won the FLR Coopertition Award in 2010, and all we did was try to win every game by as much as possible...

[coldfusion1279]

Perhaps I am being pessimistic about the Q&A, but I really don't think it will be easy to answer so many questions efficiently and self-consistently.

The more teams there are-> the more questions will be asked-> the more people they need to answer questions-> the more conference calls they need to have-> more Q&A admins miss meetings-> the longer it takes to answer a question-> more communication break-down-> inconsistency in the Q&A.

If you want more consistent answers, then the Q&A needs to be a small focus group. Answering that many questions in a small focus group would be a full time job, or else the process takes many days. The logistics are tough unless you are on the phone 50% of your day.

Solution: Hire a full time Q&A/Rules focus group, or eliminate the Q&A and go back to the way it was 3 years ago (when there were seemingly less "rule disgraces" at events).

[bduddy]

I watch a lot of streams on Twitch.tv (video game streaming site) which used to be or is owned by the same company as Justin.tv (Twitch.tv just got bought by CBS Interactive so I don't know if this is still true) and their admins are very friendly and supportive of all channels. Maybe FIRST and the community can get in touch with the administrators of Justin or Twitch to make sure the licenses are known and approved for X, Y, Z channels on A, B, C dates.

I think FIRST regionals are "technological" and "gamey" enough to be appropriate on Twitch but that would be a question for their admins I guess.

(I know the madstream chat was running on Twitch because I could do the twitch emoticons http://i.imgur.com/eYHF9.png)I was thinking about twitch.tv a little bit earlier... they already do some non-video-game-related stuff (like trading card games, for example) and from what I've heard they're very responsive to emails, etc.

[Racer26]

The way the Coopertition award is sorted results in the team that WON the fewest matches (winning zero matches in the optimal case), while getting Coop points in the MOST matches.

Ex:

Hypothetical teams 5555 6666 7777 and 8888 are playing at an event.

Team 5555 is a powerhouse, and wins all 10 of their matches, and coopertates in every match.

Team 6666 is similarly strong winning their 10 matches, but DOESNT coopertate.

Team 7777 is a weak team that loses every match, but coopertates every match.

Team 8888 is a weak team that loses every match and only manages to coopertate 5 of the 10 matches.

The rankings look like this:

Team QS CP First Order Second Order
1. 5555 40 20 ((20x2)-40)=0 20
2. 6666 20 0 ((0x2)-20)=-20 0
3. 7777 20 20 ((20x2)-20)=20 20
4. 8888 10 10 ((10x2)-10)=10 10


As you can see, team 7777 wins, despite being just as coopertative as 5555.

[Debbie]

6) The smoking area. (Im sorry, I am allergic to smoke)

I do have to say that my team did not take a team picture by the FIRST flag because of this. While I agree that people need a place to do so if they choose, by the picture op. may not have been the best spot.

[Mr V]

It's been a little strange since its inception. We won the FLR Coopertition Award in 2010, and all we did was try to win every game by as much as possible...

I guess you must not have been successful at winning every game by as much as possible as that year it was won by winning by the least amount possible. I know our team won it in Seattle that year by specifically going after it. Once we got a fair amount ahead our driver would start scoring goals for the other alliance, that was also good for gaming one of the ranking order of sorts, the 2nd IIRC. It was a very bad way to have both set up, but I read the rules and explained it to the drive team and they agreed it was the "right" thing to do even if it felt wrong.

[pfreivald]

I guess you must not have been successful at winning every game by as much as possible as that year it was won by winning by the least amount possible. I know our team won it in Seattle that year by specifically going after it. Once we got a fair amount ahead our driver would start scoring goals for the other alliance, that was also good for gaming one of the ranking order of sorts, the 2nd IIRC. It was a very bad way to have both set up, but I read the rules and explained it to the drive team and they agreed it was the "right" thing to do even if it felt wrong.

Well, we did something right, because in addition to the coopertition award we were also #1 seed and tournament champions. :D

(Besides, what you say is not entirely true... The coopertition bonus had nothing to do with how much you beat your opponent by, only how many points they scored... So a 10-9 victory was just as good as a 20-9 victory in that regard.)

[Mr. Van]

The Coopertition Award needs serious review. One of the major problems this year was that Coopertiton points were assessed as an alliance, not as individual teams. In many events, the team that won the award never actually participated in the act of balancing (or even attempting) to balance the Coopertiton Bridge. At one event, the award would have gone to a team that left at the end of the first day... Not really cooperating nor competing. It is difficult to inspire with an award that has such criteria.

If the award were given to teams that attempted the Co-op Balance the most, that would be more appropriate. Hopefully the GDC will make adjustments to next year's game.

For those keeping score, I think the Coopertition Bridge itself is one of the best things about a fantastic game this year.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

[Mr V]

(Besides, what you say is not entirely true... The coopertition bonus had nothing to do with how much you beat your opponent by, only how many points they scored... So a 10-9 victory was just as good as a 20-9 victory in that regard.)

Oops. It was the ranking sort that was based on the difference in scoring IIRC.

The Coopertition Award needs serious review. One of the major problems this year was that Coopertiton points were assessed as an alliance, not as individual teams. In many events, the team that won the award never actually participated in the act of balancing (or even attempting) to balance the Coopertiton Bridge. At one event, the award would have gone to a team that left at the end of the first day... Not really cooperating nor competing. It is difficult to inspire with an award that has such criteria.

If the award were given to teams that attempted the Co-op Balance the most, that would be more appropriate. Hopefully the GDC will make adjustments to next year's game.

For those keeping score, I think the Coopertition Bridge itself is one of the best things about a fantastic game this year.

- Mr. Van
Coach, Robodox

Yes I agree that the basis for winning the Coopertition award this year wasn't the best but it does change from year to year. As I stated earlier in this thread they way it was done last year was the best in the 4 seasons I've been involved with FRC. 2010 was worse since it was easily gamed by scoring points for your opponent, as were the rankings.

Which reminds me having the Hybrid points being the second order of sort for the rankings was the best since I've been involved as it encouraged teams to have an autonomous routine or two. The bonus for "Hybrid" was also the best yet as it encouraged having an autonomous routine and allowed the 2 pt dumpers to score almost as much or even more than the 3pt shooters in Hybrid.

[pfreivald]

Oops. It was the ranking sort that was based on the difference in scoring IIRC.

Also not quite true:

"All teams on the winning ALLIANCE will receive a number of seeding points equal to the penalized score (the score with any assessed penalties) of the winning ALLIANCE plus 5 additional points for winning the match.
All teams on the losing ALLIANCE will receive a number of seeding points equal to un-penalized score (the score without any assessed penalties) of the winning ALLIANCE."

I think where you're getting confused is that in general, you'd rather have won a game 10-9 than 10-1, but 15-9 was still better than 10-9. (For you and your opponents!)

[Craig Roys]

The rankings look like this:

Team QS CP First Order Second Order
1. 5555 40 20 ((20x2)-40)=0 20
2. 6666 20 0 ((0x2)-20)=-20 0
3. 7777 20 20 ((20x2)-20)=20 20
4. 8888 10 10 ((10x2)-10)=10 10


As you can see, team 7777 wins, despite being just as coopertative as 5555.

The real kick in the pants is that in your scenario, team 5555 with 20 CP points comes in 3rd in the race for the award...they even fall behind team 8888 who was only able to get 10 CP points. This is the first year I can think of that a team would have to purposely lose matches if they wanted to be competitive for the CP award. Weird.

[bduddy]

Also not quite true:

"All teams on the winning ALLIANCE will receive a number of seeding points equal to the penalized score (the score with any assessed penalties) of the winning ALLIANCE plus 5 additional points for winning the match.
All teams on the losing ALLIANCE will receive a number of seeding points equal to un-penalized score (the score without any assessed penalties) of the winning ALLIANCE."

I think where you're getting confused is that in general, you'd rather have won a game 10-9 than 10-1, but 15-9 was still better than 10-9. (For you and your opponents!)That was almost certainly the worst seeding system in FRC history... it was the only one where the losing alliance got points based on the winning alliance's score, which really doesn't make any sense.

[Solidstate89]

That was almost certainly the worst seeding system in FRC history... it was the only one where the losing alliance got points based on the winning alliance's score, which really doesn't make any sense.

It really was. And due to the extreme rule changes that year, you could see the drop in registrations for 1st week regionals the proceeding season. It's why we skipped FLR last year because it was a first week. Thankfully they switched to a second week so we went again this year.

[torihoelscher]

I am pretty sure the reason they do speeches during Einstein is to give the robots a chance to cool down and for the teams to perform maintenance/battery changes on the robots between matches.

So its either speeches that are gonna be made one way or the other, or another 5 minutes of dancing to Cotton Eye Joe.


I say we dance to the 5 mins of Cotton Eye Joe even though I love the speeches, it would get energy pumping again!! I know I danced the cotton eye joe when I was down near the stage! It got me extremely excited to watch the matches! :)

[Grim Tuesday]

I say we dance to the 5 mins of Cotton Eye Joe even though I love the speeches, it would get energy pumping again!! I know I danced the cotton eye joe when I was down near the stage! It got me extremely excited to watch the matches! :)

All stand for the FIRST National Anthem. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddgyg_5FF_0)

[torihoelscher]

All stand for the FIRST National Anthem. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddgyg_5FF_0)

Ha ha ha ha ha! Amazing!

I cant wait to see pictures of the Championship!!!

[R.C.]

Jim, don't forget the elim's match where we had a ball jam up in the collector. (which had never happened before.) I thought it was just really bad luck at the time, but now I think it could have been that the balls were actually different from the rest of the season.

1323 had the same issues in Semi Match 2 on Galileo. We had not jammed all weekend until then...

I wouldn't mind if I played with a certain set of balls all comp or all division!

-RC

[kmusa]

Actually, from what I gathered at regionals/champs, quite a few teams considered the variable. It's just that very few teams actually built to account for it.

I know I was skeptical during week 1 about the ball deterioration being a huge factor, I was proven dead wrong during shooter testing. We then spent the rest of the season, right up until the championship, trying to build a ball compression tester that would account for that. We never got it to work.

[this probably belongs in 2012 Lessons Learned: The Rebuttle]

Sorry about digressing, but I need to offer some clarification. Our big problem was that our shooter's performance wasn't very repeatable - we need more research in the off-season.

The balls are cheap, foam basketballs. Early in the season, they were described as all from the same lot (Q&A, maybe?). From comments from Championships, sounds like there was a second lot. They vary in size, weight, and compressibility. From what we saw, as well as others (525 posted their ball data, 12.5% was the highest range of values for a single ball), each ball also varied in uniformity - orientation was significant. (And there was a hysteresis effect as well.)

And what did we ultimately see? Some teams shot well, some didn't, and 16 was in a class by itself.

I will echo earlier comments - whatever game peices the GDC selects, they need to be available quickly in reasonable quantities, and for a reasonable price. Companies deal with these issues all the time - sign the NDA, and get ready for a really strange purchasing cycle.

I am so glad we went to Championships, and I can't wait to get back there again.

[nitneylion452]

I think the issue with the extreme variability in the balls at CMP (though I was not there) is this:

In the beginning of the season, the GDC ordered what they though at the time were enough balls, one "batch," if you will. As the season progressed, they ran out or were running low on balls from that batch due to the high number of balls that were getting ripped to shreds (the no damage to game pieces rule was very difficult to enforce and very easy to commit). So for the CMP, rather than use old balls, FIRST ordered more from the manufacturer, but these were different. Thus different balls.

[techhelpbb]

I think the issue with the extreme variability in the balls at CMP (though I was not there) is this:

In the beginning of the season, the GDC ordered what they though at the time were enough balls, one "batch," if you will. As the season progressed, they ran out or were running low on balls from that batch due to the high number of balls that were getting ripped to shreds (the no damage to game pieces rule was very difficult to enforce and very easy to commit). So for the CMP, rather than use old balls, FIRST ordered more from the manufacturer, but these were different. Thus different balls.

This is logical. However, logically they should have checked and mixed the batches so that one doesn't eventually find that almost all the balls on the final playing matches are unusual from the original standards.

This would also have given people a little warning of what was coming.

[Siri]

This is logical. However, logically they should have checked and mixed the batches so that one doesn't eventually find that almost all the balls on the final playing matches are unusual from the original standards.

This would also have given people a little warning of what was coming.Even if they didn't do that (which they should have, if this was the problem), just saying "we'll be introducing new balls in eliminations" and (if true) "these are from another manufacturer's batch and may behave differently" when they were asked. Transparency does wonders! Providing the opportunity to "check-out" a few balls from pit admit beforehand to test with would also have done wonders.

[techhelpbb]

Even if they didn't do that (which they should have, if this was the problem), just saying "we'll be introducing new balls in eliminations" and (if true) "these are from another manufacturer's batch and may behave differently" when they were asked. Transparency does wonders! Providing the opportunity to "check-out" a few balls from pit admit beforehand to test with would also have done wonders.

I agree about the transparency, but the issue then becomes what you can do about it. In some cases some designs are totally without issue (catapults) but others to increasing extents might not be all that compatible and now you have to race to compensate.

Still they could have announced it long before the competition itself and then the playing field is level.

[Craig Roys]

The lesson learned here is not so much for FIRST, but for the teams...build with game piece variability in mind. It seems our team did not do so well this season; we did a pretty good job accounting for differences for most of the season, but the new balls for elims in St. Louis showed that we didn't do enough. We've got some ideas to try to improve for the offseason...keeping fingers crossed.

[Tom Line]

Every single one of these complaints was overshadowed by us having a great time at the event. My experience was FAR more positive than negative. Let's just keep improving it.

1. The district trophies were embarassing.

2. This year, the primary Championship Handout did not have the MARS or MSC teams listed in them at Championship unless they had pre-registered. I can only assume this is because the events were so late that they couldn't get the documents printed.

3. Light the targets! In too many situtaions we have rear or front projected screens in direct view of the targets from all angles. Those screens - especially in the case of the Troy District in Michigan, we almost the same saturation and luminescant values as a lit vision target. There was almost no way to filter the darn things as they cycled through dozens of sponsor logos and colors.

4. There needs to be substantially more time between the division fields end of qualification and start of elimination. Many teams couldn't even each lunch, much less get their triple balance in. Our triple balance practice time was AFTER our first match had been played.

5. The Q&A stunk. I'll be blunt - the Q&A folks need to be given the authorization to tell people things are legal or illegal. Period. Even if it's not answer the GDC might have wanted, put it out there so people can design their bridge hanger etc without guesswork. Wading through the Q&A also stunk unless you wanted to read it cover to cover.

6. It's time to include actual GP in the GP award. Rather than just giving it to the team that had the money to bring a full machine shop, let's have GP judges looking for things like obnoxious noise, not saving seats, NOT yelling robot, and let's get that stuff in the rules. FIRST - yelling robot IS NOT A GOOD THING. Stop encouraging it!

7. The referees, and specifically the head referees need to start listening to the teams. Blowing off multiple teams when we have Q&A's up on our smart phones that answer the question at hand SPECIFICALLY is ridiculous. I'm speaking of the issues seen on Galileo, with ball placement. What happened there was a travesty. For a head ref to make a change to how balls have been placed all year at the champs is crazy. For that same ref to ignore multiple teams complaints and proof that it's wrong is worse. Then, to create a new rule on the fly - that teams have to be off the field before the balls were placed on the bridges..... If it seems I'm bitter, I am. We missed seeding first by one qual point, and we lost a match by 1 point where the volunteer specifically moved the balls after we set up our robot so we could not pick them up in hybrid by placing them to the extreme outer portions of the bridge. They later did the same thing to 33, and several other teams with hybrids that went after the balls on the bridge. I'm over it now.... but the head refs need to be more responsive to the students and more active in going up the ladder to resolve problems.

8. Swerve drive and judges. FIRST, can you please start teaching your judges about swerve drive? Every year, at nearly every event I've been to someone wins an award for swerve drive. I suppose it's overwhelmingly neat for people who haven't seen it before, but it's not new, it's rarely novel, and it's time for the judges to start looking at unique solutions to the game problem rather than a drive train that's been done a thousand times.

9. Steele Meetings may need to be reconsidered. In some cases rooms were marked up 50-100%. If you called the hotel directly and booked for a large number of people, you could get a 20-30% discount beyond the normal price. I know we certainly won't be using them with that type of price markup.

[BrendanB]

7. The referees, and specifically the head referees need to start listening to the teams. Blowing off multiple teams when we have Q&A's up on our smart phones that answer the question at hand SPECIFICALLY is ridiculous. I'm speaking of the issues seen on Galileo, with ball placement. What happened there was a travesty. For a head ref to make a change to how balls have been placed all year at the champs is crazy. For that same ref to ignore multiple teams complaints and proof that it's wrong is worse. Then, to create a new rule on the fly - that teams have to be off the field before the balls were placed on the bridges..... If it seems I'm bitter, I am. We missed seeding first by one qual point, and we lost a match by 1 point where the volunteer specifically moved the balls after we set up our robot so we could not pick them up in hybrid by placing them to the extreme outer portions of the bridge. They later did the same thing to 33, and several other teams with hybrids that went after the balls on the bridge. I'm over it now.... but the head refs need to be more responsive to the students and more active in going up the ladder to resolve problems.


I agree with everything you said; however, what rule is there regarding ball placement? All I could find was [G05]
Each Bridge will be preset with two Basketballs. Basketballs allotted to Robots that are not used, will be preset on the Coopertition Bridge.


FIRST really dropped the ball this year with communicating updates to head ref at events with regard to what to follow based on Q&A findings. Volunteers don't have the time to read through all of the Q&A but FIRST should either add to the weekly update recent answers from the Q&A that are important or establish that any answer to the Q&A stands as an official rule. Very frustrating to see but I'd stand behind the head refs decision (currently) because to my knowledge they have been told to follow the game manual not the Q&A.

@Craig Roys

Great point! People need to stop complaining about the variability in a foam basketball. These are a child's toy, not a NBA basketball required to have the same properties. Several teams caught on to how the balls acted and moved to catapults others like our team analyzed the problem and how to work around it. Granted our shooter isn't 100% accurate but it is pretty darn close between a new and used ball. Unless you feel like paying more for FIRST to physically check each and every game piece to make sure they all have the same physical properties, just move along.

[Gregor]

I agree with everything you said; however, what rule is there regarding ball placement? All I could find was [G05]
Each Bridge will be preset with two Basketballs. Basketballs allotted to Robots that are not used, will be preset on the Coopertition Bridge.




The Q&A specified that the 2(+) balls will be centered both lengthwise and widthwise on the bridges.

Specifically

Game - The Game » Pre-Match » G05
Q. In a prior Q&A response, you said that prior to the beginning of the match, "The placement [of balls on the bridges] will generally be as close to the center of the Bridge as possible." Is this the center lengthwise, widthwise, or both? FRC0341 2012-01-31
A. Both

[Solidstate89]

Great point! People need to stop complaining about the variability in a foam basketball. These are a child's toy, not a NBA basketball required to have the same properties. Several teams caught on to how the balls acted and moved to catapults others like our team analyzed the problem and how to work around it. Granted our shooter isn't 100% accurate but it is pretty darn close between a new and used ball. Unless you feel like paying more for FIRST to physically check each and every game piece to make sure they all have the same physical properties, just move along.

A lot of teams adjusted for having to deal with whether the ball was new or whether it was used and worn down.

What was impossible to predict (unless you're Car-Nack) was that FIRST would use physically different balls from a different manufacturer/batch and that even worse we wouldn't have even been told. All over these forums you can see how the new ones they used in St. Louis had entirely different compression, texture, etc. This wasn't just a worn state vs. a new state. This was Ball A vs. Ball B where Ball B was either from a different manufacturer (not what from what I've seen) or an entirely different batch with a different...everything.

Catapaults were totally unaffected as far as not being jammed, but even if your shooter was fine, the new balls reacted totally differently to bouncing off of the backboard as well. Transparency at the MINIMUM from FIRST would have been appreciated if they were unable to secure enough balls from the initial batch to last the entire season. At least many of us teams would have had a fighting chance for adjusting our loaders for an entirely different ball.

We were prepared for new vs. used. We were not prepared for an entirely new batch, and I don't think that's too much to ask for. Especially if they would have provided an announcement telling us as much.

[BrendanB]

The Q&A specified that the 2(+) balls will be centered both lengthwise and widthwise on the bridges.

Specifically

The Q&A did but the game manual did not. As of right now (as far as I know) head refs follow the Game Manual NOT the Q&A. I'm saying that FIRST needs to establish that the Q&A should be followed as rules.

We both agree here.

A lot of teams adjusted for having to deal with whether the ball was new or whether it was used and worn down.

What was impossible to predict (unless you're Car-Nack) was that FIRST would use physically different balls from a different manufacturer/batch and that even worse we wouldn't have even been told. All over these forums you can see how the new ones they used in St. Louis had entirely different compression, texture, etc. This wasn't just a worn state vs. a new state. This was Ball A vs. Ball B where Ball B was either from a different manufacturer (not what from what I've seen) or an entirely different batch with a different...everything.

Catapaults were totally unaffected as far as not being jammed, but even if your shooter was fine, the new balls reacted totally differently to bouncing off of the backboard as well. Transparency at the MINIMUM from FIRST would have been appreciated if they were unable to secure enough balls from the initial batch to last the entire season. At least many of us teams would have had a fighting chance for adjusting our loaders for an entirely different ball.

We were prepared for new vs. used. We were not prepared for an entirely new batch, and I don't think that's too much to ask for. Especially if they would have provided an announcement telling us as much.

FIRST probably doesn't know that these balls are different and they don't have to make ensure every ball in every case they receive are identical. Yes these balls behaved differently but I point the finger (and even that is too harsh because we are a customer) to the manufacturer.

FIRST mentioned several times that there would be new balls for elims. We asked around at our regional (CT) if new balls would be introduced and they were. Ask and you shall receive. FIRST HQ doesn't directly control the field reset crew and the introduction of new balls. It is your responsibility to know your field at competition. Once those fields leave Manchester they are in the hands of the event.

Yes this was a frustration to teams but we can't complain to HQ saying they need to provide a more consistent game piece next season when all they did was order new balls for the championship elimination and that is what they received.

They probably don't know these balls were different! :eek:

[Siri]

FIRST mentioned several times that there would be new balls for elims. We asked around at our regional (CT) if new balls would be introduced and they were. Ask and you shall receive. FIRST HQ doesn't directly control the field reset crew and the introduction of new balls. It is your responsibility to know your field at competition. Once those fields leave Manchester they are in the hands of the event.I hope that I am misremembering, but when the question was as at Champs concerning on what schedule the balls would be replaced, we were told that it would be 'like the regionals' (implying all the regionals were the same), 'there is no set schedule'.

I know they definitely did not overturn the Q&A that reads:
Q: Our team has discovered variances in ball diameter and compressibility. The balls in the KOP can be compressed approx. ½” more than the balls we got from AndyMark. We wish to know if the balls at competitions will be like the KOP balls, similar to the ones received from AM, or a mixture of both?
A: All Balls with the FIRST/Foot Locker Foundation logos are all from the same batch - so, a mixture of both.

I think we can all be fairly confident that the elim balls were not a "mixture of both" the AndyMark and KOP balls. I understand the Q&A is not heralded as "official" enough (I file this under negative lessons every year...) in all circumstances.

[Solidstate89]

My main contention is still the lack of transparency. And unless we all went with a catapult design, it still would have been impossible to properly compensate because the balls we were provided in the KOP as well as the balls we could purchase were completely different than what they provided in the Elims.

If FIRST couldn't guarantee complete consistency (which for a toy part, I don't expect them to) we should have been told from the beginning that they would have had different batches. Saying they would have "new balls" doesn't mean much without context. We had "new" and used balls at the Regionals we attended as well but they were of the same batch provided in the KOP as well as what we could purchase.

Some would (and I believe it's the position you're taking) argue that having to deal with inconsistent game pieces is part of the game. And I would agree...up to a reasonable point. What happened in St. Louis I believe goes beyond that reasonable point.

[Craig Roys]

The Q&A did but the game manual did not. As of right now (as far as I know) head refs follow the Game Manual NOT the Q&A. I'm saying that FIRST needs to establish that the Q&A should be followed as rules.

There was a slightly larger problem, and I believe it originated from the head field reset person (not sure what the official name is) and backed up by the head ref. After playing 3 matches on Thursday and 1 Friday morning with the balls being placed on the coop bridge where we expected (the same place they where they were being placed for the other 3 fields and the same place they were for all of the 3 other competitions we attended plus the couple competitions I went to to watch), the field reset crew and head ref decided they needed to switch it up. We have a hybrid mode that goes to the bridge to grab one of the 2 balls, then go back to the key to shoot 3 balls at the basket. After we set up, the balls were moved on the coop bridge to make it near impossible for us to get one of them; when we tried to realign our robot we were told we couldn't and that the balls were supposed to be "randomly" placed after the robots were set up. Nowhere in the rules does it state this. I also did not believe that they were randomly placed - it appeared they were purposely placed where we would not be able to get one. After the match we found the q&a questions and responses to show to the head ref - he refused to acknowledge them choosing to keep his interpretation. I continued to watch set up of the field for other matches. If no robot on the field had an obvious hybrid mode that went to the bridge first, the balls were placed in the same two center spots we became accustomed to. Whenever a team with a bridge autonomous such as ourselves or a couple of other teams were on the field, the balls were purposely (not randomly) placed in locations where the robot would not be able to get one of them. It was as if we were being punished for working hard to develop an auton that goes to the bridge to get a ball. We played 3 matches like this before the head ref was told from above that he needs to have the balls placed on the coop bridge the same as the other 3 fields. This is unfortunate considering we missed 2nd seed by 1 QP - granted, other teams were affected by it as well so it's hard to say if anything would be different. I find it appalling that this could happen at the FIRST Championship - there was, for whatever reason, a bias against teams with a bridge hybrid mode.

Okay, done ranting now...we had a great time at the competition, that part of it was just a bit frustrating.

[kjohnson]

The side of very single box of balls I ever looked at bore the label "box n of 1,111". It's possible that they were from separate production runs, but they were obviously all shipped at the same time.

To everyone who is still complaining about discussing the difference in balls, I can vouch for Alan's post. While the balls may not have been from the same production lot, they all came from the same shipment of 1,111 cases (6 balls/case). I doubt FIRST could have known about the differences in balls ahead of time without opening a ton of the cases.

The balls used at regionals were from the same shipment as the balls used at Championship (both qualification and elimination matches). I can't speak for the balls that AndyMark sold, but I'm fairly certain they came from the same shipment as well.

Yes, balls were replaced before elimination matches with brand new balls. This should have been no surprise since it was supposed to happen at ever regional event. Yes, there was sometimes quite a difference between ball foam "density." Sometimes there were even noticeable differences between balls that came from the same case.

Are we forgetting that FRC is an engineering challenge?

:deadhorse:

[IndySam]

If no robot on the field had an obvious hybrid mode that went to the bridge first, the balls were placed in the same two center spots we became accustomed to. Whenever a team with a bridge autonomous such as ourselves or a couple of other teams were on the field, the balls were purposely (not randomly) placed in locations where the robot would not be able to get one of them. It was as if we were being punished for working hard to develop an auton that goes to the bridge to get a ball. I find it appalling that this could happen at the FIRST Championship - there was, for whatever reason, a bias against teams with a bridge hybrid mode.

I can absolutely guarantee you that this was not the case. If it appeared it was it was truly just a random thing. I am basically appalled that you would believe that the head ref or reset people would conspire against you.

[Grim Tuesday]

I've always thought that:

Q&A>Team Updates>Manual>Chief Delphi

Next year, there should be a clause in the manual on kickoff that codifies this.

[waialua359]

Our team has never used Steele Meetings.
Its not rocket science to understand that its a ripoff and you can get better deals just by shopping around or booking yourself.
Its a deal when compared to "regular" hotel room rates, but as a person who has coordinated and booked all of our team travels since 2003, there are always much better options if you do some research on your own.

[Tom Line]

I can absolutely guarantee you that this was not the case. If it appeared it was it was truly just a random thing. I am basically appalled that you would believe that the head ref or reset people would conspire against you.

Indy, I can only tell you what I observed from my time in the stands. We noted times when the field was reset where the balls were placed fairly near the center. We also noticed that on a number of occasions when robots set up to clearly go to the bridge, balls were placed at the extreme edges. Once, our robot was lined up to get a ball, and they went out and moved the ball. A second time, they placed the balls and when the drive team went to line the robot up, they were told they could not because the balls had to be placed after the teams left the field.

In the end I suspect you are right and that there was no active bias against teams that could pick from the bridge. However, the arbitrary rule creation (can't line up your robot, balls have to be placed after teams leave the field, and balls will be randomly placed anywhere on the bridge) was extremely frustrating when the top 5+ robots on the field were seperated by 1 point.

It's all old news anyway. It was a great competition. This is just something that needs to be highlighted so that hopefully FIRST and their head refs can learn from it in the future.

[apalrd]

I can absolutely guarantee you that this was not the case. If it appeared it was it was truly just a random thing. I am basically appalled that you would believe that the head ref or reset people would conspire against you.

We saw this as well. In several matches, the same thing happened to us (and our scouts, like 1718's, found that it was happening in matches where a robot was setup to do a bridge autonomous, but not other matches)

When we questioned the field reset (and later head ref) including the Q&A mentioned above (stating that the balls will be placed in the center of the bridge), they made up stuff about the ball placement requiring the balls to be symmetrical on the bridge but not necessarily in the center, and the Q&A not being the rules.

When we talked to Aiden Brown (FRC Head Ref), including a picture of the ball placement and Q&A, the ball placement went back to normal (side by side, center of the bridge).

[bduddy]

At the St. Louis Regional, I (as field reset) was originally told that while the balls on all three bridges had to be fair to both sides, there was no requirements for them to be in any particular position (although in general I tried to put them on the two "center" spots). I assume that was the original assumption your ref was operating on, as there was nothing in the rules about it... and if the GDC intended for there to be, they really needed to put it there. You can't have "unwritten rules" in games that no one has played before...

[ratdude747]

I worked field reset at BMR.

I was told that there was "no guarantee" to teams on ball placement. That said, I remembered the Q/A post and made an effort to keep the ball placement consistant and to correct any incorrect placements.

The pattern that on Fri/Sat of BMR (I wasn't there on Thurs) for a 2-2-2 scenario was :

Alliance bridges: The balls were in a centered line perpendicular to the barrier.

Co-op bridge: The balls were in a centered line parallel to the barrier.


My understanding was that Q/A answers were like team updates; they held equal power as the original canon of the 2012 rules as they were in a way an extension of the rules.

[Tristan Lall]

FIRST used to be more explicit about the role of Q&A responses. In the mid-2000s (the last time they specified this), the general idea was that the rules were the rules, and that Q&As don't overrule them for any reason, and instead only interpret them. Only updates could do that (and updates were supposed to be incorporated ASAP to reduce confusion). E-mail blasts, blogs and other documentation were also subordinate to the rules.

Since then, I've operated under the assumption that if a rule flatly contradicts a Q&A response, the rule takes precedence. (In other words, for a Q&A response to be effective, the rule and the Q&A must be read together, and have a logically consistent interpretation.) When enforcing a rule against a team, the team should be entitled to rely upon FIRST's official statements to a very large degree—which leads to difficult decisions to bend rules according to principles of equity. That is never something undertaken lightly, but I strongly feel (and many other officials agree) that teams should not be placed in a Kafkaesque situation where even when they do what FIRST asks of them, they are still inconvenienced or harmed.

Note that the VRC and FTC Q&As operate differently from the FRC one, in terms of the degree to which the answers are directly binding.

As for the balls, I'm honestly not that concerned. Assuming that FIRST made only correct statements about the nature and source of the balls, they've satisfied their core responsibility, which was to use what they said they'd use. Of course, it would have been ideal (from the perspective of a shooter) for FIRST to have a more consistent ball supply...but they never actually said that the balls would be consistent to any particular degree (beyond the Q&A and manual information referenced above). The differences between balls might well be normal manufacturing variance, and as such could plausibly be the responsibility of the teams to identify and account for.

[Craig Roys]

I can absolutely guarantee you that this was not the case. If it appeared it was it was truly just a random thing. I am basically appalled that you would believe that the head ref or reset people would conspire against you.

IndySam,

First off, I don't believe they were conspiring against just us, there were other teams affected by this as well. I don't make that accusation lightly, I am one of the first to give the refs and field reset the benefit of doubt - much to the chagrin of my team sometimes. The placement of the balls on Friday morning/afternoon before the situation was corrected was highly suspicious. I didn't want to believe it myself until I watched a bunch of matches and witnessed the scenario I mentioned.

I hold no grudges and, as I said previously, we still had a great time; I was just disappointed that (random or not) that this could happen at the Championship event.

[torihoelscher]

Look the 2012 Season is pretty much over. Why dont we start focusing on more positive things? We need to post the more positive things in the "2012 Lessons Learned: The Positive (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=106207)" I think we hit the dead horse with the stick too many times. I am ready to move onto TNT, IRI, Embry Riddle, the 2013 season, and volunteering.

The FIRST representatives must be like "Oh come on! Stop posting in the Negative, didnt you guys have fun?!? We did a lot of great things this year!"

Even though a lot of things happened this year, positive or negative, FIRST was awesome! I dont know about you, but the Finale parties afterward were amazing and a huge step up from last year! Even though, we had the Black Eyed Peas concert last year I had more fun this year than I did then!! Thats saying A LOT.

So please, lets put the stick down and go to another forum to post positive things!

[Karthik]

Look the 2012 Season is pretty much over. Why dont we start focusing on more positive things? We need to post the more positive things in the "2012 Lessons Learned: The Positive (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=106207)" I think we hit the dead horse with the stick too many times. I am ready to move onto TNT, IRI, Embry Riddle, the 2013 season, and volunteering.

The FIRST representatives must be like "Oh come on! Stop posting in the Negative, didnt you guys have fun?!? We did a lot of great things this year!"

Even though a lot of things happened this year, positive or negative, FIRST was awesome! I dont know about you, but the Finale parties afterward were amazing and a huge step up from last year! Even though, we had the Black Eyed Peas concert last year I had more fun this year than I did then!! Thats saying A LOT.

So please, lets put the stick down and go to another forum to post positive things!

I've seen this sentiment a lot. While I agree that we shouldn't dwell on the negative, you can't improve if you don't focus on your faults. If a student gets an 85% on an algebra test, they shouldn't sit around looking at all the questions they got right, they need to critically assess the ones they got wrong.

Frankly, I think FIRST did a lot of amazing things this year and if I were grading them it would be in the 90-95% range. Still, we'd be remiss as a community if we didn't focus on that 5-10% that needs to be improved. It's all about striving for perfection.

Of course there's multiple ways to look at the negatives. You can rudely complain and not offer solutions. Or you can produce constructive criticisms that take us towards improvements and solutions. From what I've seen in this thread, it's definitely more of the latter.

[Carolyn_Grace]

I've seen this sentiment a lot. While I agree that we shouldn't dwell on the negative, you can't improve if you don't focus on your faults. If a student gets an 85% on an algebra test, they shouldn't sit around looking at all the questions they got right, they need to critically assess the ones they got wrong.

Frankly, I think FIRST did a lot of amazing things this year and if I were grading them it would be in the 90-95% range. Still, we'd be remiss as a community if we didn't focus on that 5-10% that needs to be improved. It's all about striving for perfection.

Of course there's multiple ways to look at the negatives. You can rudely complain and not offer solutions. Or you can produce constructive criticisms that take us towards improvements and solutions. From what I've seen in this thread, it's definitely more of the latter.

This.
Plus, when you talk about Positives, there's not much more to comment on, other than, "Yep, I agree." But when you talk about Negatives, people are analyzing situations and trying to offer possible solutions. So, while the negative thread appears longer, I actually think that people have posted more positive items than negative. Of course, I'd have to take the time to list them out to be sure of this...anyone bored enough/have the time on their hands to do this?

[pfreivald]

It's all about striving for perfection.

Bah! What would the Simbots know about that? :yikes:

[Jin Hayashi]

One of the unexpected problems our team ran into was the weight difference between the competition bridge and the practice bridge. Usually the lower cost field alternative provides the same experience as the competition field, but the bridge this year is one of the few exceptions that I have seen.

We were able to successfully lower our practice bridge and the bridge on a practice field built by another local team. However, we found the competition bridge was heavier. We were able to create a stronger bridge manipulator, but it wasn't until Friday during lunch of our regional competition that we were able to get it onto our robot.

I wasn't sure whether I should have put this under the negative lessons learned. It would be better put under 2012 Lessons Learned because it was both positive and negative. (A third neutral category would probably be an overkill on this topic)

Cheers

[Grim Tuesday]

One of the unexpected problems our team ran into was the weight difference between the competition bridge and the practice bridge. Usually the lower cost field alternative provides the same experience as the competition field, but the bridge this year is one of the few exceptions that I have seen.

We were able to successfully lower our practice bridge and the bridge on a practice field built by another local team. However, we found the competition bridge was heavier. We were able to create a stronger bridge manipulator, but it wasn't until Friday during lunch of our regional competition that we were able to get it onto our robot.

I wasn't sure whether I should have put this under the negative lessons learned. It would be better put under 2012 Lessons Learned because it was both positive and negative. (A third neutral category would probably be an overkill on this topic)

Cheers

This issue associated with this is the difficulty associated with creating a calibrated bridge. We never calibrated ours (and payed for it dearly at our first event), but I've heard of it taking north of 100 lbs to calibrate the bridge without infringing on its other functionality. This should be taken into account when designing the low cost field and game elements in the future.

[Solidstate89]

One of the unexpected problems our team ran into was the weight difference between the competition bridge and the practice bridge. Usually the lower cost field alternative provides the same experience as the competition field, but the bridge this year is one of the few exceptions that I have seen.

We were able to successfully lower our practice bridge and the bridge on a practice field built by another local team. However, we found the competition bridge was heavier. We were able to create a stronger bridge manipulator, but it wasn't until Friday during lunch of our regional competition that we were able to get it onto our robot.

I wasn't sure whether I should have put this under the negative lessons learned. It would be better put under 2012 Lessons Learned because it was both positive and negative. (A third neutral category would probably be an overkill on this topic)

Cheers

Is that what happened? I was trying to figure out at FLR why so many teams had difficulty getting the bridge down. Veteran teams at that; who I knew built their own fields. That certainly explains quite a bit.

I believe we re-calibrated our bridge in about Week 4, but I never got too deep into the details as to why. I just assumed they had calibrated it wrong to begin with, not that we realized we were off from the competition bridges.

[mcb]

I was my team's representative for the alliance selections on Galileo. I'm not sure if it it was like this on the other fields as well, but none of us could hear or see a single thing that was going on during the selections due to our position on the floor. At regionals, the representatives are typically facing the field with their backs to the stands. On Galileo, it looked like drive coaches were along that wall? Not sure. Anyway, I understand that there's 100 students in this group, but it would be nice to know what's happening on the field, what round of selections is occurring, and what alliance you're on before you start walking out there.

[Cory]

One of the unexpected problems our team ran into was the weight difference between the competition bridge and the practice bridge. Usually the lower cost field alternative provides the same experience as the competition field, but the bridge this year is one of the few exceptions that I have seen.

We were able to successfully lower our practice bridge and the bridge on a practice field built by another local team. However, we found the competition bridge was heavier. We were able to create a stronger bridge manipulator, but it wasn't until Friday during lunch of our regional competition that we were able to get it onto our robot.

Cheers

FIRST explained that the low cost bridge would not function properly without weight being added. They had a video showing that two batteries needed to be a certain distance from the edge for it to function as a competition bridge would.

[Gray Adams]

I was my team's representative for the alliance selections on Galileo. I'm not sure if it it was like this on the other fields as well, but none of us could hear or see a single thing that was going on during the selections due to our position on the floor. At regionals, the representatives are typically facing the field with their backs to the stands. On Galileo, it looked like drive coaches were along that wall? Not sure. Anyway, I understand that there's 100 students in this group, but it would be nice to know what's happening on the field, what round of selections is occurring, and what alliance you're on before you start walking out there.

Curie had representatives curving from the side of the field all around the back, but everyone could see the screen if they turned, and everyone was facing the field.

[Tom Line]

FIRST explained that the low cost bridge would not function properly without weight being added. They had a video showing that two batteries needed to be a certain distance from the edge for it to function as a competition bridge would.

They explained it in a video that was neither called out in the rules or the practice field prints.

I had absolutely no idea the bridges were that different until the videos got posted here are on Chief Delphi. This is one of those things that should have gone out in an email blast (or something). Things should NOT be left to chance.... especially when it seems like a big portion of that is "did he happen to click the right link on the right page to end up in the right place to see a video that doesn't appear to be critical but ends up being critical.....

It's notoriously hard to find things on the FIRST site. That's why so many people get so much information through Chief Delphi. I'm on both sites daily during the build season, and I still miss things. I'm not surprised many teams got bit on the butt by this one.

Luckily, in most cases you could count on someone on your alliance to be able to put down the bridge.

[BigJ]

They explained it in a video that was neither called out in the rules or the practice field prints.

I had absolutely no idea the bridges were that different until the videos got posted here are on Chief Delphi. This is one of those things that should have gone out in an email blast (or something). Things should NOT be left to chance.... especially when it seems like a big portion of that is "did he happen to click the right link on the right page to end up in the right place to see a video that doesn't appear to be critical but ends up being critical.....

It's notoriously hard to find things on the FIRST site. That's why so many people get so much information through Chief Delphi. I'm on both sites daily during the build season, and I still miss things. I'm not surprised many teams got bit on the butt by this one.

Luckily, in most cases you could count on someone on your alliance to be able to put down the bridge.

It was either shown at kickoff or the videos were called out during the kickoff if I remember correctly.

[Dad1279]

http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/competition-manual-and-related-documents

The links to the videos are right on the Competition Manual Page, right below the link to the Field Drawings.

[Craig Roys]

Of course there's multiple ways to look at the negatives. You can rudely complain and not offer solutions. Or you can produce constructive criticisms that take us towards improvements and solutions. From what I've seen in this thread, it's definitely more of the latter.

I completely agree, and realized that I offered no solutions to my complaint about ball placement on the center bridge. My intent wasn't just to gripe, and it certainly was not meant as an attack on the officials and field reset personnel although it may have seemed that way - my apologies.

While I believe that the GDC did a tremendous job this year in creating a game, they were a little too ambiguous in certain areas - one of them being ball placement. The officials and field reset personnel should not have to make any decisions about game piece placement - it should be very clear from the game manual (this year it was not). I think the game manual needs to be very specific about location of game pieces at the start of a match - especially those that may be in play during the autonomous period. Are the pieces randomly located or put in specific places? If in specific places, it should be made very clear - if 2 balls on the center bridge, they go in these places; if 3 balls, they go in these places; if 4 balls...etc. If randomly located, is this done before or after the robots are set on the field? Also, if randomly located, be specific about how they are randomly determined - computer program, roll of the dice, etc. This randomization should also be available for the teams on the field to see - this would avoid any arguments.

The majority of the game manual for this year I would put as a positive - I thought it was very well done; however, ball placement at the start could have been made more clear.

[pfreivald]

Yeah, the field tour videos are part of the manual on the website. We didn't calibrate our bridge full time, we just added weights to test the manipulator -- and while we were at it, we added more than was necessary to make sure we were a bit over-engineered on the manipulator side of things. Balancing on the uncalibrated bridge was harder than on the actual bridge, so that was actually useful for training purposes!

[Koko Ed]

Gotta do my duty and point out the defieincies with suggestions.

1. Kinect: More trouble than it's worth.

SUGGESTION: If FIRST is going to tack on some game element due to a big sponsor offering up a big endorsement make it worth teams while to use it (like givng extra points for scoring using it). If they have no incentive then they are going to do what they did this year and simply not use it. The only thing it really did was cause replays.

2. FMS issues.
SUGGESTION: Obviously further testing is needed. Maybe additional week zero events would help.

Animation Competition. 75 out of 2300 teams participated. The contest is irrelevant. What does a dopey little alien have to do with what FIRST teams are doing? No wonder so many teams don't bother with it.


SUGGESTION: Why not combine the animation, CAD work and video work to create reveal videos and judge them for awards? At least it would cause more teams to use the program more often than they do now.


FOR WEEK 1 ALAMO:
The event is a bit too ambitious for it's own good.
SUGGESTION: Perfect running the FRC aspect and then start to tackle FTC and FLL all at once.

Crowd control issues. Too many kids kept wandering down onto the field area repeatedly.

SUGGESTION: Partly my fault and Jess offered a suggestion the will keep that from happening again. There needs to be serious consequences for going down into the field area just like in other sports (wander onto a basketball court or football field in the middle of a game and see what happens to you). You are disrupting the event when you do that.

Walk in volunteers would just disappear at the end of their work shift without so much as a word and leave us in quite a bind.

SUGGESTION: Walk in volunteers need their own co-0rdinator to work with Jess (she has enough to do) so they can better handle their comings and going and let us know when it's time to go home so we can properly adjust to their absence.



FOR WEEK 2 FLR:
There was alot of space in the pit area but the pits still seemed all squished together.

SUGGESTION: Perhap spreading them out a little bit more wouldn't hurt.



FOR WEEK 3 MONTREAL:
The seating was ill concived (960 seats are no where near enough for a FIRST event. even a small one.
The queing entrance and the main entrance for the audience criss crossed causing a bottleneck and a safety hazard.
SUGGESTION: The only solution would most likely be going to a new venue.

Volunteering was a bit undermanned. More crowd control was needed badly (I must have turned away 500 people that weekend from coming into the field).

SUGGESTION: Just be mindful of the needs of crowd control.

FOR WEEK 4 BOSTON:
I know VIPs are important and bring alot of money and even attention to the event but they need to be better controlled. Too often they get in the way and disobey event rules (if the participants have to wear proper shoes and safety glasses why can't they. Is it too much to contact them and instruct them what they should and should not wear to the event?).

SUGGESTION: Have FIRST design a booklet to give to VIPs on what to do at the events including proper attire so there will be no problems.

Killer stairs. It just seems like the climb to the top of the Agganis Arena is significantly higher than any other arena I've seen. You need mountain climbing equipment to get to the top.

SUGGESTION: Honestly I have no idea how to make this one better.

Parking. If Angry Eric didn't rate a parking pass then who did?

SUGGESTION: Let volunteers know ahead of time if they have or have not gotten the free pass and how much they will have to pay to go to the event so paying out of pocket won't be such a shock to them.

FOR WEEK 5 DC:
Load in.Rather jumbled and kind of dangerous.

SUGGESTION: Have more control down on the street. Too many teams seemed to be scrambling up to the docks and practically climbing over each other to drop the robot and stuff off.

Allowing teams to go back to their pit during elims. The pits were spread out far and wide and a couple of teams nearly missed their match.

SUGGESTION: Keep them by the field and just have a courier bring them batteries.


FOR WEEK 6 QUEEN CITY:

Outcast Pit. Many of the teams had no idea what was going on in the arena.

SUGGESTION: Find a way to wire in video and standing back there so they don't feel so isolated.

Volunteer Room was really far away. The room was nice but no way I was climbing four stories to get food. Thank God the elevator worked.

SUGGESTION: Is there a closer room available?




FOR WEEK 7 MSC:
The food. Particularly breakfast. A bagel just isn't going to cut it.

SUGGESTION: Could a better variety be offered? Just a couple more options would be nice.

The crazy pit structure. I know FiM is loyal to the arena but man o man is it hard to get used to teams being so spread out like that.

SUGGESTION: It would be so cool if MSC could go to an big stage where such an event as spectacular as it could really shine like Ford Field but I know that really isn't possible. I guess the pit issue is just something to deal with.

FOR THE CHAMPS:
The tunnel leading up to the arena has too much traffic causing teams to struggle to make their matches.

SUGGESTION: A separate passage to FTC team may have helped ease the congestion a little bit.

The Hall of Fame. It's a joke. Period. I feel badly for 359 who worked long and hard to get to the HOF and all they get is a little table to show for it. FIRST keeps saying the Chairman's Award is it's highest honor but they sure don't treat it that way.

SUGGESTION: Let the Hall of Fame teams run it. Many of these teams run off season events and even regionals. I bet a committee from each of these teams could come up with something that would bring honor to the Hall of Fame.

Scary weather. Two years in St. Louis. Two years severe weather has threatened the event.

SUGGESTION: Uhmmm..is the Georgia Dome still available....?

[rocknthehawk]

The Hall of Fame. It's a joke. Period. I feel badly for 359 who worked long and hard to get to the HOF and all they get is a little table to show for it. FIRST keeps saying the Chairman's Award is it's highest honor but they sure don't treat it that way.

SUGGESTION: Let the Hall of Fame teams run it. Many of these teams run off season events and even regionals. I bet a committee from each of these teams could come up with something that would bring honor to the Hall of Fame.


This x1000

[waialua359]

Gotta do my duty and point out the defieincies with suggestions.

1. Kinect: More trouble than it's worth.

SUGGESTION: If FIRST is going to tack on some game element due to a big sponsor offering up a big endorsement make it worth teams while to use it (like givng extra points for scoring using it). If they have no incentive then they are going to do what they did this year and simply not use it. The only thing it really did was cause replays.

2. FMS issues.
SUGGESTION: Obviously further testing is needed. Maybe additional week zero events would help.

Animation Competition. 75 out of 2300 teams participated. The contest is irrelevant. What does a dopey little alien have to do with what FIRST teams are doing? No wonder so many teams don't bother with it.


SUGGESTION: Why not combine the animation, CAD work and video work to create reveal videos and judge them for awards? At least it would cause more teams to use the program more often than they do now.


FOR WEEK 1 ALAMO:
The event is a bit too ambitious for it's own good.
SUGGESTION: Perfect running the FRC aspect and then start to tackle FTC and FLL all at once.

Crowd control issues. Too many kids kept wandering down onto the field area repeatedly.

SUGGESTION: Partly my fault and Jess offered a suggestion the will keep that from happening again. There needs to be serious consequences for going down into the field area just like in other sports (wander onto a basketball court or football field in the middle of a game and see what happens to you). You are disrupting the event when you do that.

Walk in volunteers would just disappear at the end of their work shift without so much as a word and leave us in quite a bind.

SUGGESTION: Walk in volunteers need their own co-0rdinator to work with Jess (she has enough to do) so they can better handle their comings and going and let us know when it's time to go home so we can properly adjust to their absence.



FOR WEEK 2 FLR:
There was alot of space in the pit area but the pits still seemed all squished together.

SUGGESTION: Perhap spreading them out a little bit more wouldn't hurt.



FOR WEEK 3 MONTREAL:
The seating was ill concived (960 seats are no where near enough for a FIRST event. even a small one.
The queing entrance and the main entrance for the audience criss crossed causing a bottleneck and a safety hazard.
SUGGESTION: The only solution would most likely be going to a new venue.

Volunteering was a bit undermanned. More crowd control was needed badly (I must have turned away 500 people that weekend from coming into the field).

SUGGESTION: Just be mindful of the needs of crowd control.

FOR WEEK 4 BOSTON:
I know VIPs are important and bring alot of money and even attention to the event but they need to be better controlled. Too often they get in the way and disobey event rules (if the participants have to wear proper shoes and safety glasses why can't they. Is it too much to contact them and instruct them what they should and should not wear to the event?).

SUGGESTION: Have FIRST design a booklet to give to VIPs on what to do at the events including proper attire so there will be no problems.

Killer stairs. It just seems like the climb to the top of the Agganis Arena is significantly higher than any other arena I've seen. You need mountain climbing equipment to get to the top.

SUGGESTION: Honestly I have no idea how to make this one better.

Parking. If Angry Eric didn't rate a parking pass then who did?

SUGGESTION: Let volunteers know ahead of time if they have or have not gotten the free pass and how much they will have to pay to go to the event so paying out of pocket won't be such a shock to them.

FOR WEEK 5 DC:
Load in.Rather jumbled and kind of dangerous.

SUGGESTION: Have more control down on the street. Too many teams seemed to be scrambling up to the docks and practically climbing over each other to drop the robot and stuff off.

Allowing teams to go back to their pit during elims. The pits were spread out far and wide and a couple of teams nearly missed their match.

SUGGESTION: Keep them by the field and just have a courier bring them batteries.


FOR WEEK 6 QUEEN CITY:

Outcast Pit. Many of the teams had no idea what was going on in the arena.

SUGGESTION: Find a way to wire in video and standing back there so they don't feel so isolated.

Volunteer Room was really far away. The room was nice but no way I was climbing four stories to get food. Thank God the elevator worked.

SUGGESTION: Is there a closer room available?




FOR WEEK 7 MSC:
The food. Particularly breakfast. A bagel just isn't going to cut it.

SUGGESTION: Could a better variety be offered? Just a couple more options would be nice.

The crazy pit structure. I know FiM is loyal to the arena but man o man is it hard to get used to teams being so spread out like that.

SUGGESTION: It would be so cool if MSC could go to an big stage where such an event as spectacular as it could really shine like Ford Field but I know that really isn't possible. I guess the pit issue is just something to deal with.

FOR THE CHAMPS:
The tunnel leading up to the arena has too much traffic causing teams to struggle to make their matches.

SUGGESTION: A separate passage to FTC team may have helped ease the congestion a little bit.

The Hall of Fame. It's a joke. Period. I feel badly for 359 who worked long and hard to get to the HOF and all they get is a little table to show for it. FIRST keeps saying the Chairman's Award is it's highest honor but they sure don't treat it that way.

SUGGESTION: Let the Hall of Fame teams run it. Many of these teams run off season events and even regionals. I bet a committee from each of these teams could come up with something that would bring honor to the Hall of Fame.

Scary weather. Two years in St. Louis. Two years severe weather has threatened the event.

SUGGESTION: Uhmmm..is the Georgia Dome still available....?
I dont really care for spending too much time complaining about the negatives, as we are still very humbled by winning the award in 2011.
I will say this though.
No one from FIRST contacted me at any point during the season about the change in the HOF setup.
Here we spent the last several months planning and creating a booth space, including lugging it all at VEX Worlds the week before, only to find out from Cory (Team 254) here on CD the day before CMP that we get a little table.

Why even have a main contact in TIMS?

And I will say this again...if FIRST values the CMP CA as its highest award, and given the opportunity to decide who gets to go to the White House to celebrate the meaning of FIRST, they shoot us down.
The worst feeling was getting phone calls from some very respectable people in FIRST while they were in DC asking where we were staying? My response, "Uh? You guys are visiting who? When?"
Our congressional representative did some investigating for us in DC and gave us some interesting info that I dont ever care to share here on CD.

[Carolyn_Grace]

Gotta do my duty and point out the defieincies with suggestions.

FOR WEEK 7 MSC:
The food. Particularly breakfast. A bagel just isn't going to cut it.

SUGGESTION: Could a better variety be offered? Just a couple more options would be nice.

The crazy pit structure. I know FiM is loyal to the arena but man o man is it hard to get used to teams being so spread out like that.

SUGGESTION: It would be so cool if MSC could go to an big stage where such an event as spectacular as it could really shine like Ford Field but I know that really isn't possible. I guess the pit issue is just something to deal with.


Noted! And feedback is appreciated.
I personally agree about the food, and while it is currently a budget issue, perhaps we can figure something else out for next year.

[Bob Steele]

Gotta do my duty and point out the defieincies with suggestions.

Scary weather. Two years in St. Louis. Two years severe weather has threatened the event.

SUGGESTION: Uhmmm..is the Georgia Dome still available....?


I seem to remember bad weather in Atlanta too... At least something caused all those broken windows and damage back a few years ago... let me see,,, Yes it was a tornado ....I remember several teams got displaced from their hotels...

I don't think anywhere we go would be immune to weather conditions in April... or the possibility of earthquake or whatever...

[Hjelstrom]

I seem to remember bad weather in Atlanta too... At least something caused all those broken windows and damage back a few years ago... let me see,,, Yes it was a tornado ....I remember several teams got displaced from their hotels...

I don't think anywhere we go would be immune to weather conditions in April... or the possibility of earthquake or whatever...

Hey, Vegas has terrific weather in April!

[Thad House]

Hey, Vegas has terrific weather in April! I second that vote. Or bring it up to the PNW. There might end up being rain, but nothing more then that.

[Bob Steele]

I second that vote. Or bring it up to the PNW. There might end up being rain, but nothing more then that.

Just remember the size of the venue necessary...
You need something like the Georgia Dome
or the Edwards Jones Dome in St. Louis to have the space.
Or Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis

If there is something like this in Vegas I am all for it...I don't think Seattle has anything big enough... or Portland...
The Seahawk stadium is outside... no pro football in Portland...

The size of the venue is really restricting...

[pfreivald]

The Seahawk stadium is outside...

That will be a problem for a lot of places known for nicer weather!

[ratdude747]

I seem to remember bad weather in Atlanta too... At least something caused all those broken windows and damage back a few years ago... let me see,,, Yes it was a tornado ....I remember several teams got displaced from their hotels...

I don't think anywhere we go would be immune to weather conditions in April... or the possibility of earthquake or whatever...

Just remember the size of the venue necessary...
You need something like the Georgia Dome
or the Edwards Jones Dome in St. Louis to have the space.
Or Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis



I suggest Lucas Oil in Indy... there are rarely tornadoes there, the worst weather is usually small hail (pea size, once in a blue moon golf ball size).

[torihoelscher]

We could have it in North Carolina. There are pretty big stadiums over there.

In Fayetteville where I grew up we had the Crown Center used for Graduations, Minor League Hockey games, and concerts. Maybe not big enough for a championship but its big enough to hold a competition. (Also there isnt a big area for pits in the Center but there is an Exposition Center that goes from 10,000 sq feet to 60,000 square feet. Pretty much NEXT door!!! :) ) I really like this area because there is a lot of room.

http://www.atthecrown.com/facilities.aspx

Please check this out!

[Alex2614]

Less than 100 teams in a division would be great. Also, I agree with the idea of division awards. When there are 400 teams, that means that over 90% of teams attending the championship will come home with nothing as far as hardware is concerned. This is too big of a margin in my opinion.

FIRST really needs to do something on their online system. Not only is the FIRST website clunky and hard to navigate around, some of its most important information is very well hidden. For example, how do I find out what awards a team from my area (or something like that) has won? It is impossible to find, especially for "outsiders." Stuff like that should be easy to find and more up-front. And it's not just for awards. It is hard to find any information about teams and events, and when you do, a lot of times it is very outdated or misinformed.

Going along with that, why has the Hall of Fame been swept into the corner and out of the way the past two years? They should be out front for everyone to see. I was disappointed with its location last year tucked into a corner. This year, I was even more disappointed with its size and location. Had I not known what I was looking for, I would have missed the Hall of Fame teams. These are your best teams and the model teams for FIRST. They deserve to be out front in plain sight for everyone to see.

The finale was much better than last year, but it was a logistical nightmare. Granted, it was complicated even more with the weather issue. However, I know we almost had some issues keeping track of our students across four different venues, and I can't imagine how hard it would be for some other teams. Keep it in one place, or two places at minimum. Having four different parties going on at once is just too much.


On a lighter note (and I guess this belongs in the positive), I am very glad that FIRST has stepped away from the path they were trying to go down last year. Rock stars, rock concerts, famous people, big names are all great, but when they overshadow what the event is truly about, it becomes disturbing. Don't change who we are to appeal more to the outside world. Change the outside world around us and inspire them to join. I am very glad that FIRST has put a better balance on what is important.

[Libby K]

On a lighter note (and I guess this belongs in the positive), I am very glad that FIRST has stepped away from the path they were trying to go down last year. Rock stars, rock concerts, famous people, big names are all great, but when they overshadow what the event is truly about, it becomes disturbing. Don't change who we are to appeal more to the outside world. Change the outside world around us and inspire them to join. I am very glad that FIRST has put a better balance on what is important.

This isn't really a 'part' of this thread, but I just wanted to clarify something real quick. I've already expanded on this, if you'd like to talk more about it check here (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1073347&postcount=169) and/or PM me.

...The concert was a celebration of our 20th year, donated to us. Wouldn't you take that if it were given to you?

will.i.am choosing to connect with Dean and with FIRST was a such a wonderful opportunity. Will supports FIRST, and continues to do so. Having such a big name being able to go around and tell others about our program? Talk about culture change...

[Carol]

This isn't really a 'part' of this thread, but I just wanted to clarify something real quick. I've already expanded on this, if you'd like to talk more about it check here (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1073347&postcount=169) and/or PM me.

...The concert was a celebration of our 20th year, donated to us. Wouldn't you take that if it were given to you?

will.i.am choosing to connect with Dean and with FIRST was a such a wonderful opportunity. Will supports FIRST, and continues to do so. Having such a big name being able to go around and tell others about our program? Talk about culture change...

Amen Libby!

[Alex2614]

I understand that. What I'm saying is that the entire year last year they kept saying "FIRST kids aren't geeks." Stuff like that. They kept trying to change the image of who we are. In the words of Dave Lavery, "I'm a geek and I'm $@#$@#$@#$@# proud of it." THAT'S who FIRST is. Promote our image and who we are, don't change it to appeal to the rest of the world. That may not have been what their intentions were, but that's how it came across to a lot of people.

And yes, the concert was nice. However, when FIRST blatantly lied to us about why the fields were in the pits, that was pretty offensive. Bill Miller said that the fields in the pits has nothing to do with the concert at all, which was obviously a lie. FIRST was originally planning to have half of the dome empty until the concert plan came through? I'm sorry, but that's bull and everyone knows it. It's all a part of the transparency issue. The lies are where the issue is. If they are going to do something like that, at least be truthful and up front with us. FIRST gave the image that the Black Eyed Peas and famous people are more important than the students and the competition. The image was that they kicked us out of the dome for the concert. Like I said, the concert was great and it was a great time, but things could have been handled differently. I know that this was not the image that FIRST was planning on giving, but that's how it came across to the teams.

Libby, everything you said in the post you linked to should have been publicly announced and explained by FIRST. I understand where you are coming from and I agree with everything you have said. All I'm asking is to try to see it from our point of view. I think everyone can agree that you probably have more of an inside view than the rest of us do... This is what it looked like from our point of view:
We had no warning or explanation for what was going to transpire at the cmp '11, then suddenly shortly before we got there, FIRST tells us that the fields are now in the pits (which, by the way, was a part of the "original plan" according to Bill Miller) and there will be a concert stage in the dome (which had nothing to do with the fields in the pits according to Bill Miller). Then having to play almost the entire cmp (with the exception of 2 matches) in the pits with seats that could not fit everybody (we had parents that could not watch matches because there were no seats) combined with other problems and discomforts and pains. All of this for a concert. FIRST had at this point yet to give a public announcement explaining why all of this was going on and to explain to teams the inside information that you have been saying. And then on top of that, we get what is obviously a lie about why we were experiencing what we were experiencing. The teams and robots were being overshadowed and kicked under the bus for the rock stars. Then there were other things that furthered our frustration, such as the hall of fame teams being shoved into the corner where nobody could see them, and out in the open is all of the big name sponsors, etc. I actually looked for the hall of fame to talk to them, and couldn't find them for the longest time. This year was a little better.

All I'm saying is that all of this gave the wrong image and there was not enough transparency to the teams. FIRST's heart was in the right place last year. I'm not saying the concert and Will.I.Am is a bad thing. In fact, I think it's great. But their approach left a little to be desired. This year, FIRST had a better balance in promoting the students and who we are.

I'm not just saying that the CMP was better this year because of the fields issues. Everything was handled better and there was a better balance everywhere one looked between the students and teams and robots and who FIRST is and the big names and sponsors. Logistics-wise the event was better as well. Things were laid out better mostly because FIRST had learned from last year. Things flowed better, etc.

[Taylor]

I understand that. What I'm saying is that the entire year last year they kept saying "FIRST kids aren't geeks." Stuff like that. They kept trying to change the image of who we are. In the words of Dave Lavery, "I'm a geek and I'm $@#$@#$@#$@# proud of it." THAT'S who FIRST is. Promote our image and who we are, don't change it to appeal to the rest of the world. That may not have been what their intentions were, but that's how it came across to a lot of people.
I do see your point, especially given Dr. Flowers' description of "SuperNerds" in 2010. However, I got a different reading from the promotional items. I got "FIRST kids aren't just geeks - they're also athletes, inventors, friends.
And yes, the concert was nice. However, when FIRST blatantly lied to us about why the fields were in the pits, that was pretty offensive. Bill Miller said that the fields in the pits has nothing to do with the concert at all, which was obviously a lie. FIRST was originally planning to have half of the dome empty until the concert plan came through? I'm sorry, but that's bull and everyone knows it. It's all a part of the transparency issue. The lies are where the issue is. If they are going to do something like that, at least be truthful and up front with us.
It wasn't lies, it was meant to be a surprise. Please don't complain about the party that was thrown in your honor because they didn't use your favorite color of balloons.
FIRST gave the image that the Black Eyed Peas and famous people are more important than the students and the competition. The image was that they kicked us out of the dome for the concert. Like I said, the concert was great and it was a great time, but things could have been handled differently. I know that this was not the image that FIRST was planning on giving, but that's how it came across to the teams.With all due respect, the BEPs and other celebs were more important than us. We didn't make an hourlong ABC special, and fund it from our own bank accounts.
We had no warning or explanation for what was going to transpire at the cmp '11, then suddenly shortly before we got there, FIRST tells us that the fields are now in the pits (which, by the way, was a part of the "original plan" according to Bill Miller) and there will be a concert stage in the dome (which had nothing to do with the fields in the pits according to Bill Miller). Then having to play almost the entire cmp (with the exception of 2 matches) in the pits with seats that could not fit everybody (we had parents that could not watch matches because there were no seats) combined with other problems and discomforts and pains. All of this for a concert. FIRST had at this point yet to give a public announcement explaining why all of this was going on and to explain to teams the inside information that you have been saying. And then on top of that, we get what is obviously a lie about why we were experiencing what we were experiencing. The teams and robots were being overshadowed and kicked under the bus for the rock stars. If FIRST had declared there was going to be a free BEP concert, they would have invited a hailstorm (no pun intended) of security troubles.

[Karthik]

I understand that. What I'm saying is that the entire year last year they kept saying "FIRST kids aren't geeks." Stuff like that. They kept trying to change the image of who we are. In the words of Dave Lavery, "I'm a geek and I'm $@#$@#$@#$@# proud of it." THAT'S who FIRST is. Promote our image and who we are, don't change it to appeal to the rest of the world. That may not have been what their intentions were, but that's how it came across to a lot of people.

Since when was the FIRST image intrinsically tied into "nerd pride"? If being a part of FIRST means that you have to be a nerd and proud of it, clearly I'm in the wrong program and need to find somewhere else to go. Being a geek and proud may be part of who you are, and that's more than fine, but it's certainly not a part of who I am and who many others are in this program.

Painting with broad brush strokes almost always results in an ugly picture.

[Alexa Stott]

Wait, I thought this thread was about 2012? :confused:

[rutzman]

There still seems to be an emphasis on starting new teams, but many areas don't have the mentors and veteran support structure to insure their sustainability. While many teams work with rookies and younger teams in their area, perhaps more teams would get involved if it became one of Dean's homework assignments, or was encouraged through a similar avenue.
I've been a bit out of touch with things, so if FIRST has put out anything on this and I've missed it, it would be greatly appreciated if someone could point me in that direction.

On a lighter note (and I guess this belongs in the positive), I am very glad that FIRST has stepped away from the path they were trying to go down last year. Rock stars, rock concerts, famous people, big names are all great, but when they overshadow what the event is truly about, it becomes disturbing. Don't change who we are to appeal more to the outside world. Change the outside world around us and inspire them to join. I am very glad that FIRST has put a better balance on what is important.

This has been discussed to death in a number of threads. Let's move on and keep this one on topic: areas where things can be made even better for the 2013 season.

[torihoelscher]

With all due respect, the BEPs and other celebs were more important than us. We didn't make an hourlong ABC special, and fund it from our own bank accounts.


My team did a special on our local ABC News Because of the special. We got a call from ABC Action News and asked us to do a special for them.

Consequently, because of the celebrities and that hype we got a great opportunity.

:) It was pretty awesome!!!!!!!!!

[pfreivald]

If FIRST had declared there was going to be a free BEP concert, they would have invited a hailstorm (no pun intended) of security troubles.

I have no use for a BEP concert, but would totally rock out to Halestorm!

Since when was the FIRST image intrinsically tied into "nerd pride"? If being a part of FIRST means that you have to be a nerd and proud of it, clearly I'm in the wrong program and need to find somewhere else to go.

Yup. I'm a geek and sufficiently self-confident that I don't care whether or not other people care, but there are plenty of FIRSTers who are passionate about science and technology but aren't into the whole "geek pride" thing.

[Alex2614]

First of all, let me just say that I understand where everyone is coming from. I'm not saying that the image and promotion and concerts and whatnot was bad last year, all I'm saying is that there was a better balance this year. That is all. Better balance. No need to take it out of context.

Wait, I thought this thread was about 2012? :confused:

It was. I made a side comment about what went better in 2012 in comparison to 2011 and people didn't fully understand what I meant.

Let's just please move on. If you would like to discuss further on the topic, please PM me or email me and let's keep it away from here. As for everyone else, let's keep going with what the thread was originally intended for.

My original post with the somewhat controversial paragraph removed:

Less than 100 teams in a division would be great. Also, I agree with the idea of division awards. When there are 400 teams, that means that over 90% of teams attending the championship will come home with nothing as far as hardware is concerned. This is too big of a margin in my opinion.

FIRST really needs to do something on their online system. Not only is the FIRST website clunky and hard to navigate around, some of its most important information is very well hidden. For example, how do I find out what awards a team from my area (or something like that) has won? It is impossible to find, especially for "outsiders." Stuff like that should be easy to find and more up-front. And it's not just for awards. It is hard to find any information about teams and events, and when you do, a lot of times it is very outdated or misinformed.

Going along with that, why has the Hall of Fame been swept into the corner and out of the way the past two years? They should be out front for everyone to see. I was disappointed with its location last year tucked into a corner. This year, I was even more disappointed with its size and location. Had I not known what I was looking for, I would have missed the Hall of Fame teams. These are your best teams and the model teams for FIRST. They deserve to be out front in plain sight for everyone to see.

The finale was much better than last year, but it was a logistical nightmare. Granted, it was complicated even more with the weather issue. However, I know we almost had some issues keeping track of our students across four different venues, and I can't imagine how hard it would be for some other teams. Keep it in one place, or two places at minimum. Having four different parties going on at once is just too much.

[dlavery]

And yes, the concert was nice. However, when FIRST blatantly lied to us about why the fields were in the pits, that was pretty offensive. Bill Miller said that the fields in the pits has nothing to do with the concert at all, which was obviously a lie.

While I fully appreciate many of the other comments that have been made, I do need to correct this one. Bill Miller's statements were completely accurate. Well before Will and the BEPs were even a factor in the 2011 Championship planning, the plan was to have two of the division fields in the pits area. I am absolutely certain about this, I was there when the plans were being discussed. There are many things that can be learned from the last two years of Championship events, and the full competition seasons. However, this is not an item that needs to be added to the list.

-dave

[lemiant]

While I fully appreciate many of the other comments that have been made, I do need to correct this one. Bill Miller's statements were completely accurate. Well before Will and the BEPs were even a factor in the 2011 Championship planning, the plan was to have two of the division fields in the pits area. I am absolutely certain about this, I was there when the plans were being discussed. There are many things that can be learned from the last two years of Championship events, and the full competition seasons. However, this is not an item that needs to be added to the list.

-dave
What was originally planned for the space that they put the stage in?

[kjohnson]

What was originally planned for the space that they put the stage in?

I may be wrong, but I remember someone saying that two FRC fields were moved to the pits to shed more light on FTC and FLL in the dome. You have to remember that FIRST has more programs than just FRC, we just take up the most space.