2015 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[Koko Ed]

What things do you feel FIRST could improve upon for future years?

[sanddrag]

FIRST needs to put their long standing teams at a higher priority than mass expansion, and they need to hold some real feedback sessions with teams or an advisory panel of teams, because it seems they have a mission of what they're trying to do, and it doesn't always align with what the teams want and need. And I don't mean this about the two champs thing, but I speak on other factors. They need more integration into education.

Also, the timing of the Chairman's Award and other top awards needs to be communicated clearly, before any music festival or dance party, and certainly before everyone leaves.

[RoboticJoev]

Well to start they need to make autonomous less important, this year and last year if you missed in auto the game was over and that is not fun for that alliance or anyone watching. Going into the finals of Einstein, it was obvious that Newton was going to use every tote. As soon as they got three cans in tbe first match it was all over. In the second match, there was an even split but Hopper did not get their auto so everyone knew it was over then as well.

I also feel like far too many things were left to the refs discretion this year. Refs need to make calls in regard to penalties but they should not get to decide what scores and what does not. At the end of the season I was left wondering so many things about what counts and what does not. Can I be touching the auton stack if I am not supporting it? Does the same apply to last second cans on stacks? What does fully supported even mean? Now the point is not that there are no objective answers to these questions but that refs can and have given me different answers.

Also transport configuration was a cool idea that was implemented so poorly that it sucked what little fun this game had to offer out before the match even began. Frank said at the drivers meeting at Champs that teams have 1 minute to setup as soon as they are allowed on the field. This is however 'just a guideline' and a ridiculous one at that. To be clear, our team used every second of that minute to just unfold our robot normally. Now add that 5 robots are moving around you along with a plethora of volunteer carrying stacks of totes around and you would be lucky if robots were ready after three minutes.

The tournament structure was awful, it just does not feel rewarding making it to the finals and losing. In all honesty it felt like a challenge more than a competition and I was pretty sure that the 'c' in frc is not for coopertition.

FIRST should realize they can keep it simple, there is no need to add unnecessary game pieces that no one wants and are worth far too many points (litter).

Finally, for the love of bot just let there be some defense. This game was so boring to watch, or should I say wait becuase all I did was wait for one side to mess up and then stop caring becuase the match was over if auton had not already decided that.

[bam-bam]

I'll add quickly that while the championship in person is a great experience, I feel like those unable to attend and have to watch through the webcasts were treated somewhat poorly.

I understand some technical faults and whatnot through webcasts (dropped webcasts, cameras failing, etc.). I want to make clear that I am okay with the parts we can't fix, but rather what we can actually fix itself.

There's already been complaints of poor quality of the webcast. When I can say I prefer the Chezy Champs and PNW among others over how the championships were streamed, something isn't right about how FIRST streams. FIRST has to set a standard for streaming (and I mean in the sense that they have to be far more distinguished, not regulation)- it just looks so odd when another robotics team/organization is performing far more vastly than FIRST itself.

Also, there was just poor scheduling on the behalf of award announcements. Not once throughout the entire Einstein broadcast was it mentioned that Chairman's would be presented at the concert, and that concert in turn is streamed on the exact same stream. At the very least, it could be mentioned in the passing when the awards will be announced, instead of leaving all of us viewers confused about when it will happened.

There were also divisions being streamed through other division webcasts. I don't know if this was to entertain the crowd while the matches were starting since this was on Thursday, but that just seemed like a silly mistake to make.

[Alan Anderson]

Either stick to the published schedule, or have ubiquitous video screens showing when things are really going to happen.

[matan129]

Well to start they need to make autonomous less important, this year and last year if you missed in auto the game was over and that is not fun for that alliance or anyone watching.

I don't quite agree with you. Although I think autonomous shouldn't fully determine the winner of the match - it is no fun knowing who'd win after 15 seconds - I must say the programming in FRC is in general almost trivial.
As a programmer joining a FRC team, I felt both great joy when seeing all the awesome elements the competition has to offer, but I was also disappointed to just program couple of Talons/Victors. It was just sad to see all the potential and programming knowledge of my teammate being thrown away, redundant, like that.

Well, You might say, "there always computer vision (CV) if you want to do something complex". And you'll be both right and wrong. CV is extremely interesting and challenging (we even reached out to NVIDIA), but generally it doesn't provide any actual advantage to the robot -especially this year, when the only vision hints where the idiotic reflectors on the yellow totes.

So, to wrap up - yes, it may be better to let the auto be a little less crucial but programming must be kicked up a notch.

[Anupam Goli]

*snip*I must say the programming in FRC is in general almost trivial.
As a programmer joining a FRC team, I felt both great joy when seeing all the awesome elements the competition has to offer, but I was also disappointed to just program couple of Talons/Victors. It was just sad to see all the potential and programming knowledge of my teammate being thrown away, redundant, like that.

*snip*
So, to wrap up - yes, it may be better to let the auto be a little less crucial but programming must be kicked up a notch.

This is not true at all. Driver control is only so useful. Lots of teams take advantage of sensors to automate stacking and scoring routines, feedback control is very useful in giving a smooth driving experience, and providing an easy to use interface for the drivers to use is essential for top teams.

[Boltman]

They need to do something about having super large student body teams taking completely over all the prime seating in venues. Its ridiculous.

I get the team spirit stuff...but in no way should one two or three teams take up for the entire days competition all the best central seats. I was looking for a single seat to scout and thy were all saved by various teams with enormous student bodies. One day I found a central seat and would not budge all day.

All teams deserve some of the prime space. Fix it. That aspect was really bad this year.

[orangemoore]

They need to do something about having super large student body teams taking completely over all the prime seating in venues. Its ridiculous.

I get the team spirit stuff...but in no way should one two or three teams take up for the entire competition all the best central seats. I was looking for a single seat to scout and thy were all saved by various teams with enormous student bodies.

All teams deserve some of the prime space. Fix it.

There is no seat saving...

If there is an empty seat you have the right to take it.

[SciBorg Dave]

Have a spot for all the eliminations where the 4th alliance member can be with their robot to be introduced, they deserve that.

[connor.worley]

So, to wrap up - yes, it may be better to let the auto be a little less crucial but programming must be kicked up a notch.

If you want to get an advantage w/ programming focus on controls not CV.

[Boltman]

There is no seat saving...

If there is an empty seat you have the right to take it.

I did..that does not change the issue when you have hundred same team members taking up an entire prime seating section. There are 40-60 teams not just 3 huge student body ones.

[Dale]

The idea of moving thousands of people from one end of the dome to another in the middle of closing needs to be revisited. I felt bad for the winners and finalists of Einstein getting their award in front of a empty stands. Breaking up the closing activities with another 45 minutes of pounding DJ music before continuing with the program seems like a poor choice. Finally if you aren't going to provide food for everyone then there needs to be a LOT more concessions open with better options.

FIRST has struggled to recreate the finale in Atlanta in St. Louis. This year's event was another attempt but by starting so crazy late after people had been sitting for over six hours didn't work out for many. Well over half the dome emptied.

Looking back over my last 11 years of leading a FRC team things that seem to make good games are:

1) The outcome shouldn't be decided by what happens in autonomous or endgame. This year's can grabbing auto and minibots come to mind as bad game design.

2) There needs to be defense! It's not really a game without it. This year was more of a robot demonstration.

3) Games constantly decided by penalties are frustrating especially in the early weeks. That wasn't a problem this year but was last year.

4) The engineering challenge needs to be different and interesting. This year was good in that regard. Totes and Cans were hard to manipulate.

5) Auto should be worth the trouble. This year's game was fine in that regard.

In my opinion this year's game was one of the worst and the engineering challenge among the best so I guess it averages out. Hopefully we'll return to an actual game next year.

[James1902]

Posting on mobile on the bus home so please forgive some typos.

1) Don't have the Einstien matches on one side of the stadium and closing ceremonies on the other. It messes with the flow of the event, adds more time delays go an already behind schedule (probably) evening, and moving a group of students through those crowds efficiently and safely is a nightmare. Also it left few people to cheer for this year's Champion Alliance as they got their award.

2) If you want FIRST to grow outside the usual crowd someone must provide a better home viewing experience. That means tailoring a broadcast too a remot audience instead of pumping out the in-stadium feed on a webcast. The FRC Live bit is a step in the right direction but the desk commentators were grossly underutilized and the on field interviews didn't really provide any nuance or useful insight. That's not entirely the field reporters fault BTW, that's a much harder job than people think and FIRST should have prepped her better or got someone whose done more of those type of standup reports before.

3) there needs to be more arena staff at Champs, especially in the upper bowl on Sat. There was no one to be found as people sat in the aisles, threw toilet paper (don't know where they got that) over the jumbo torn and clogged the stairs.

4) Make an announcement to stop throwing paper airplanes.

[Anthony Galea]

4) Make an announcement to stop throwing paper airplanes.

FIRST, if you are reading this, please do this. I was probably hit in the back of the head by ten paper airplanes, and there was someone in front of me who was hit even more. This was my first time at CMP, and saw a paper airplane land on the field before a good portion of the matches were just about to start. What if someone decides to throw it during a match, and it lands in a team's lifting mechanism or drive train, rendering them useless? Of course they might call a replay, but if someone is throwing the Championship pamphlets (like I saw a few times), it could actually damage their robot.

[SoftwareBug2.0]

1) The outcome shouldn't be essentially decided by what happens in autonomous or endgame. This year's can grabbing auto and minibots come to mind as bad game design.

...

5) Auto should be worth the trouble. This year's game was fine in that regard.

Yeah, I think it's pretty rediculous that you can win a match in a robotics competition without doing anything autonomously. They need to force teams to do something - anything - during autonomous. I would be in favor of there being some trivial autonomous task that is worth so many points that it is obvious on a first read of the rules that you can't win without doing it.

This would decide some matches during autonomous though.

[matan129]

If you want to get an advantage w/ programming focus on controls not CV.

Programming controls is boring. trivial.

[R.C.]

Programming controls is boring. trivial.

I don't think you understand what "controls" means...

[KosmicKhaos]

please, I am begging you FIRST with all my heart, please have a professional company do the stream and the audio. For those of you that were not watching the stream you have no idea what it was like.


Awards for so grainy and washed out you didn't even know who was talking
we were lucky if we got audio at some parts
During Einstein, we saw more of the human players and drivers than the actual robots
the cameras kept cutting back and forth between individual robots and missing the action so when it was over your like "huh, when did that happen"
please for the love of "bot" just show us a full field view that's what the people want
You were lucky if you got a whole match without it freezing.

I could continue in with this list but you get the point. Even if you didn't get pros to do the audio and video at least get the kids from PNW that were doing it. Shout out to the PNW A/V crew you guys were the best. High quality streams and never missed the action.

[MARS_James]

So let me go through this in order of the season:

Preseason:
My team hosts a kick-off where we usually build a team built field for others to come and look at. I understand that FIRST does not want to give teams like mine an unfair advantage but the rate in which drawings and instructions for kick-off teams come out is really irritating. My team did not receive the final field drawing till Friday at 10:30 pm due to "a miscommunication" with when that drawing should have been released.

Kick-off:
The webcast was ok from what I can remember, but I think that is going to be a big factor in my negatives this year, this game did not lend itself to memorable events.

Build season:
Please do not mock our intelligence, how did you honestly not think we were going to figure out the noodle agreement? Why are game pieces always more expensive than diamonds? FIRST should really hint to suppliers about things that may be needed to be stocked up on for certain games (Mecanums this year, ANY wheels in 2013). Why is there still not a q&a for "hypothetical or design based" questions? If I am going to ask you a question it is because either a) My robot will do a thing that then may cause another thing will I be penalized? or b) My robot is built a certain way that the rules are ambiguous about can I receive clarification on if I will be allowed to compete?

South Florida:
I do not like week 1's. I said it. We have no time to reflect on our design or finish any components, or even really fully utilize our withholding allowance. The setup for this game was unacceptable with an increase of teams we need a better seating setup as there was no way to actually watch the game unless you were in the top quarter of the seats or standing at floor level.
This is in bold because of all the parts of this game (and it beats Luncay as my least favorite) this is beyond my least favorite part of the season. I learned at the Bayou Regional that a Woodie Flowers Finalist from an out of state team was told he would not be coming out to present the award with the rest of us as it was for Florida Winners only. Who ever made this decision you are a detriment to our organization and do not deserve the power that allowed you to make that decision, while some of you may not like my bluntness their, the first ever Woodie Flowers Finalist at South Florida was from Massachusetts, and at Orlando for several years in a row was won by mentors from Pennsylvania, so it's not like their is a lot of us.

Bayou:
Load in should have been a little clearer. Pits should really, really, really, be done numerically, a scavenger hunt does not make for easy scouting or communicating will alliance partners. For pictures of awards winners your photographer should have chosen a better location.

The Game Itself:
Since Bayou was were my competition season ended I will give my feedback of the Recycle Rush here. This game sucked. I have never immediately disliked a game so much, and then continued to dislike it more and more as the season went on. I dislike any game with a lack of defense, I really dislike any game where I never interact with the other alliance. The ranking system honestly resulted in some more anguish over certain matches, what I mean is in the previous win/loss system if I had the "weaker" scoring alliance we could play defense and make the game closer or even win it, in this game if I have a "weak" scoring alliance sometimes that one match is enough to drop me out of top 4 or top 8 all together. The playoff structure was even more unforgiving and really punished teams for lack of consistency but it also meant if you had a bad first match in quarters it didn't matter what you did in the second because you were already done. I dislike the all or nothing autonomous, and really hate that at the highest level the game was decided in the first 5 seconds. Litter is the worst game piece ever actually that isn't fair, litter is the worst scoring system ever. In a game called Recycle Rush why am I being rewarded for throwing trash in my neighbors lawn?(Credit to 180 SPAM for that) Also why is 3 pool noodles thrown over equal to 6 Totes? Finally as I said/implied above this game was BORING, I do not remember a single one of my teams matches or a single play from any of my events where I thought "wow that was impressive", try to make a highlight reel out of this game then compare it to ANY of the previous ones from the last 10 years, tell me which is more entertaining.

The 2017-2020 Championship Announcement:
Why? Just why? I have answered every survey that FIRST has asked of me for 10 years and never once has the question of 2 Championships been posed. Based on Geographical distribution I will never play at Championship with any member of my 2007 or 2014 Championship alliance partners. I am not so much upset about the split I am more upset with how it was handled

2015 Championship:
I did not attend Championship for the first time since 2011 because I did not like the game that much. I also did not watch until division eliminations, which I only did in order to support the teams who I am friends with. I really really really did not like the interviews done on Einstein, they felt forced, repetitive and awkward. I REALLY REALLY REALLY did not like the treatment of the Chairman's award especially from watching at home as there was not mention of it at all.

Overall:
I love FIRST, it has shaped my entire adult life, given me life long friends, and memories I will cherish forever. That being said if this is what the new FIRST looks like I am not worried about leaving FIRST as I think FIRST may be on the track to just leave me. Please don't let Recycle Rush and the entire 2015 season be a sign of things to come, let it just be a small bump in the road to a much greater future.

[ratdude747]

Suggestions (from one of the scorekeeper/field power guys on Hopper):

Champs

-Paper airplanes need to be discouraged, not encouraged (as they seemed to be at least during opening ceremonies).
-Makes the opening ceremony in the evening if possible, or else have an afternoon load in with an evening ceremony before actual qualifications.
-Announce chairmans before Einstein matches, and give the winning team field side seating like was done in the past. It feels like chairmans has been kicked down a notch.
-The audio during the first half of-of ein-ein-stien-stein was-was bad-bad and-and echo-ho-ey-ey. Didn't somebody do a mic check, or at least have a spare mic in case there was a problem?

Game

-Bring back defense, in a 2013ish way, not a 2014ish way (2013 IMHO was the last really good game pre-IRI)
-Don't make autonomus the game deciding (or close to it) factor; this was 2003 all over again, and I don't just mean the use of totes as a game piece.
-Cheesecake in moderation, please. While it was consensual on both ends, I felt the amount of cheesecake was "gluttony" this year, especially during sub-division playoffs.
-Make the endgame where a new ability is added, not removed. While the committers of litter entering penalties should have known better, due to the lack of litter processing by most teams, it was a stupid rule.
-Bring back W-L-T, even if the quarters and semi's are matched up round robin.

Other

-When making big changes to long term strategy, ASK the community, at least those who are known to be knowledgeable and/or experienced (HOF mentors, WFA's, etc.). Sure one can't divulge venue bids and whatnot... but the split championship concept probably wouldn't have seen the light of day (at least in its current form) had such people been consulted before venues were being chosen in the first place.

[rsisk]

The audio during Einstein was terrible, at least in the upper levels where I was.

Have judging start on Thursday, not Friday.

More details on the event schedule, like what was happening next during Einstein, after Einstein so people can be in the right place at the right time (show it on the screens occasionally if nothing else)

[Alex Webber]

FIRST really needs standards for livestreaming. This year, they had so many technical problems, streams crashing, horrible angles, and horrible sound quality.

FIRST needs to set standards for webcasts. Some teams can record all the matches better then they can. By having better webcasts, we can help grow FIRST by getting people excited (like in the closing cerimonies)

Keeping to a schedule at CMP was a bit of a problem. I understand that a lot can offsest the schedule, but Recycle Rush had an extremely long reset time

[Anupam Goli]

Programming controls is boring. trivial.

There's a reason why control systems is one of the toughest subjects in mechanical and electrical engineering, and why controls engineers are heavily sought after in the job marketplace. Controls is definitely not trivial. As RC said, you may not understand what "controls" means. I suggest you look at some of the code 254 and 1114 have released previously.

[evanperryg]

1) Everything that was wrong with AA is right in this game, and everything that was right in AA is wrong is this game. I think FIRST underestimated teams' ability to make can pullers, and they overestimated teams' ability to make cooperative autonomous modes. I think some facets of RR came out of an overreaction to how last year's game was played.
2) moving to the other side of the stadium for closing ceremonies took away from the significance of the ceremony. Many people didn't get to see the Einstein finalists and winners receive their award, and people were already leaving as the championship chairman's award winner was announced.
3) the paper airplanes need to end. They are nothing more than an irritation and a mess. They get stuck in the robots. They hit the people on the floor. They encourage immature, wasteful behavior, which is pretty ironic for a recycling-themed game.
4) take the money used to get the DJ and use it to hire the PNW media people.

[Louis_]

I don't really want to talk about my opinion on the game because honestly, everyone has said it already. It was just awful. The tether idea is neat, but not one EVERY team just takes another team's idea and uses it on their own robot. At least in 2014 if you were going to add something it had to be somewhat complex, not just a ramp attached by a piece of string.

The championship webcasts - What the hell were you guys thinking? 240p? Really? The footage itself was so grainy that you could feed a family of 5 cows with all of it. The sound quality was better than the video, even with that there was constant echoing and voice amplification which hurt the viewers ears. Please do NOT raise the the volume unexpectedly! I sat there for over 1 and a half hours waiting for Einstein, and what did I get? A sub-par viewing experience WHERE I COULDN'T EVEN SEE THE WHOLE FIELD! Half of the time the can races weren't even being shown. But that can race in finals 2, that, was crazy.

Oh, and thanks for not telling anyone about the chairman's award. We sat there looking at the logo for 45 minutes, bored out of our minds. Then, you cut the stream when the concert comes. I thought you wanted to give the championship experience to everyone?

If you want people to "get into robotics more" maybe have a viewing experience where I can see the whole field.

[Caleb Sykes]

-Bring back W-L-T, even if the quarters and semi's are matched up round robin.

Please, don't do round robin if there is any appreciable defense. It will only incentivize the weaker alliances to gang up against the most powerful alliance.

[Mackenzie W]

It might be small, but load-in was really confusing. I have no clue whether registration contributed to the lack of volunteers there. The only volunteer we found co-ordinating it was organizing buses and let 2 vehicles stay parked directly in front of a door for 2 hours. Please set up lines if you want teams to abide by them, or have more solid limits on how long a vehicle can be parked.

[Metonym]

4) take the money used to get the DJ and use it to hire the PNW media people.

Thanks for the compliment; I feel like I have been hearing this a lot, but it would never work. We usually have 15 people max for one event and even then it is tough. Kids get trained on the spot and our most knowledgeable members use all their time off from school and work to attend our local events. Heck, we barely did IRI last year because so much was coming out of pocket and the adults used up vacation days.

[thatprogrammer]

Flaws of RR:
1. The bins were basically a chokehold this year. This made matches at the high level pretty boring because you know, provided no one broke, who would win based on how many bins they got. I prefer 2010, where the "Unbeatable" blocking of balls could be countered, but still gave an alliance a HUGE advantage.

2. The litter was way too powerful. Alliances could basically dominate early events with a terrible robot but amazing noodle thrower.

3. Basic bots could barely add to an alliance due to lack of defense. I mean, they can at least play defense most years!

4. The streams at world champs were disgusting. I had a friend interested in the program who was planning to watch it with me, but left because the quality and camera angles turned him off (FULL field view, PLEASE)

5. The strategy this year was very basic, because of a lack of defense.

6. The game really lacked a WOW factor, an edge-of-your-seat feel. There was no end game that could change the flow of a match, nor defense to stop scoring.

Suggestions:
1. Make autonomous less powerful, the cans decided EVERYTHING.

2. Make defense a thing again, PLEASE.

3. Set up a better stream at champs, I understand this is too expensive for regionals, but champs deserves this.

[Alex Webber]

Flaws of RR:

4. The streams at world champs were disgusting. I had a friend interested in the program who was planning to watch it with me, but left because the quality and camera angles turned him off (FULL field view, PLEASE)

3. Set up a better stream at champs, I understand this is too expensive for regionals, but champs deserves this.

I couldn't have stated it better. Streams were horrific. In the closing they stated its our job to grow FIRST. How can we do that with crappy webcasts. We need to use webcasts as draws to FIRST. First is all about Tech, so let's get techy.

Some teams have scouting programs (like mine). We need tools to train scouters. Such as FULL FIELD view from the stands.

[John Retkowski]

I agree with a lot of whats being said except for the cans and match outcome being decided in auto.

Even when 1678 and 118 got 3/4 cans, (I believe it was in semi finals on Einstein) 987 and 2826 still pulled out the victory scoring well over 200 points. Winning the can wars definitely helps, but it doesn't mean instant win or loss. You still have to stack them. In addition there were barely any matches this year where one alliance got all the cans off the step. (I can only recall two) And again in one of the two matches, the alliance that got all the cans only put up 4 very sub optimal stacks with cans, and was eliminated. There was only one match that I can think of the whole year, where the outcome was decided in auto. I think I can live with that.

[maths222]

I'm curious: which divisions were you guys watching on the stream? I watched Curie, and while the resolution was pretty bad, I generally found the camera angles and split view to be pretty nice. That said, I was generally not focused on a particular team, but rather trying to take the whole thing in as an un-invested spectator. Einstein was notably worse, with its focus on players and such (although I will say that, for those in the dome who could see the physical field as well, it may not have been as bad)

[Alex Webber]

I'm curious: which divisions were you guys watching on the stream? I watched Curie, and while the resolution was pretty bad, I generally found the camera angles and split view to be pretty nice. That said, I was generally not focused on a particular team, but rather trying to take the whole thing in as an un-invested spectator. Einstein was notably worse, with its focus on players and such (although I will say that, for those in the dome who could see the physical field as well, it may not have been as bad)

I had all of them going, on 3 monitors and a TV, so two per screen. I was not impressed at all. I hated the split. I would more rather see the whole field, the entire time.

[Louis_]

I'm curious: which divisions were you guys watching on the stream? I watched Curie, and while the resolution was pretty bad, I generally found the camera angles and split view to be pretty nice. That said, I was generally not focused on a particular team, but rather trying to take the whole thing in as an un-invested spectator. Einstein was notably worse, with its focus on players and such (although I will say that, for those in the dome who could see the physical field as well, it may not have been as bad)

I had octoview going.

[matan129]

There's a reason why control systems is one of the toughest subjects in mechanical and electrical engineering, and why controls engineers are heavily sought after in the job marketplace. Controls is definitely not trivial. As RC said, you may not understand what "controls" means. I suggest you look at some of the code 254 and 1114 have released previously.

Without getting personal here - Please, I am well aware of what controls are. I also did already see 254's code and it isn't very complex. There's just a lot of it.

I want to go ahead and further clarify that I wasn't at any point suggesting that general controls programming is easy, nor that the programming you might learn at FRC is not extensive.

I meant that the FRC controls are boring, and I'm speaking solely about the robot code. Especially when the common programming language for the cRIO / RoboRIO is LabVIEW (our team is C++ing, though), you don't really learn too much when comparing, for example, to the mechanical knowledge you might gain from a good season in FRC. The only way IMHO to gain real and comprehensive knowledge with programming at FRC is to do something that is not directly related to the robot (i.e. 254's ChessyArena (https://github.com/Team254/cheesy-arena)is absolutly fantastic), but again - few are the teams that do such projects.
The other option IMHO is to do CV - but it didn't get you real advantage in any of the last years games. Even last year the hot goal reflector was broken. I think this symbols how FIRST treats CV.

Also, I think I can safely presume that the code at 254 is more complicated than the code you will find on the average team (i.e. TrajectoryLib (https://github.com/Team254/TrajectoryLib)). All powerhouse teams have complex mechanics, and us such these teams have more systems to control. Programming more cylinders is exactly the same as programming a few in terms of complexity.

[Mike Marandola]

The tournament structure was awful, it just does not feel rewarding making it to the finals and losing. In all honesty it felt like a challenge more than a competition and I was pretty sure that the 'c' in frc is not for coopertition.

What do you mean? If a team loses in the finals, what do you want to happen?

[Kevin Leonard]

4) take the money used to get the DJ and use it to hire the PNW media people.
+1

FIRST is a technology organization. Poor stream quality, especially if they want new people to be interested in FRC, is unacceptable.

Strike a deal with Google and YouTube or one of your other supposed sponsors and partners and get every event, but especially Championships, better streaming quality.

And for Championships, get a broadcast like the one for the Michigan State Championship going on Saturday. MSC is incredible to watch, even with this year's game due to the incredible production value put into the event.

[dodar]

4) take the money used to get the DJ and use it to hire the PNW media people.

And hire the Roboshow guys to do interviews and help with game analysis.

[stens987]

I did..that does not change the issue when you have hundred same team members taking up an entire prime seating section. There are 40-60 teams not just 3 huge student body ones.

As a member of a large team, I can tell you that we get to the stadium early to have good seats. That opportunity is available to all teams.

[Kevin Leonard]

As a member of a large team, I can tell you that we get to the stadium early to have good seats. That opportunity is available to all teams.

While I don't dispute your ability to get to the stadium early to get good seats, what my (also large) team does generally is position the scouting section in good seats at championship, while the cheering and spectator section can be further up and out of the way. This also allows them to stand up and cheer more, because they won't be in the way of any scouts.

If you manage to arrive early enough to get enough seats for your large team, all the power to you. Just don't stand up right in front and cheer while my scouting team is also attempting to scout.

[stens987]

If you manage to arrive early enough to get enough seats for your large team, all the power to you. Just don't stand up right in front and cheer while my scouting team is also attempting to scout.

Well I feel like we are pretty good about only standing when they are announcing our team and a quick cheer when the match is over, but if we have ever stood in your way while you were scouting a qual, you have my sincerest apologies.

[vann2648]

Please, don't do round robin if there is any appreciable defense. It will only incentivize the weaker alliances to gang up against the most powerful alliance.

I think this is a very good point.
Imagine if AA had been scored like RR. The weaker alliances would play no defense on each other so that they would each score huge points and move on.

[Kevin Leonard]

Well I feel like we are pretty good about only standing when they are announcing our team and a quick cheer when the match is over, but if we have ever stood in your way while you were scouting a qual, you have my sincerest apologies.

Not you in particular, just large teams that stand in front. Huge pet peeve.

[MisterJ]

I think that my least favorite thing about Recycle Rush was the feeling that it generated among the teams and supporters due to the method of ranking teams (and determining quarterfinal and semifinal matches) by average score.

In other years, there was always someone to cheer for. If your team wasn't on the field, you could root for an underdog, a friendly team, or a prior alliance partner. (I can remember being ranked in the top-10 in Ultimate Ascent games and screaming for some lower-ranked teams to pull together and upset the highest-ranked ones.) Even if you had your own team's best interest in mind, there was always a team to root for.

But during Recycle Rush, the best thing for your team's ranking was to put up as many points as possible and have every other alliance do poorly - canburglar fails, stacks falling over, collisions, confusion, fouls, etc. The best case scenario for your team was to have all other teams score as low as possible.

It's a terrible feeling to have to wish that on other teams to allow your team to have the most success.

[Jared Russell]

The game was terrible to watch - by far the worst I have seen during my 15 years of participation in FRC. The only periods of excitement were the first few seconds (and occasionally the ensuing tug of war) and whenever a stack would topple.
The game challenge was too difficult for the average team. The median robot in 2013 or 2014 was far more inspiring and effective than the median robot in 2015.
The can race was way too important as a result of there not being enough cans in the game, and the resulting "arms race" absolutely burnt out a lot of teams.
Cheesecake was taken to a ridiculous new extreme this year. I want to only have to worry about building one robot in order to be competitive.
Litter, upside-down totes, and totes on the step were just unnecessary clutter that only ever lowered the level of play.
Without W-L-T or any form of (non-canburglar, non-noodle throwing) defense, outgunned teams have nothing to cheer for but for their competitors to mess up. I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit. I do not blame them (and take the cheering as a gesture of respect for our robot), but it was a little hard to swallow and to explain to our students. I wish the incentives did not align this way.
The Qualifying Average system made for a brutal eliminations bracket. Especially at events like MSC or the Championship, it is very difficult to recover from a single bad match - I like best 2 out of 3 because you can get one mulligan.
The 607 team Championship felt very crowded and chaotic. Team registration and badging took too long. There were major traffic jams in the tunnels on Thursday morning and again before eliminations.
I was once again left wondering why some of the robots I saw were at the Championship while other, far more effective robots remained home.
Once again, FIRST totally dropped the ball on making sure people can follow events from home. The Championship streams were awful, and scores and rankings weren't event updating through most of the weekend. It is 2015. Why do PNW, FiM, dozens of regionals, or Chezy Champs have better streams than the FIRST Championship?

[MsKutz]

The Higest Rookie Seed Award for Carver-Curie went to Team 5442 which was ranked 16th on Carver with an average qual score of 142.90. The higest rookie seed on Curie Team 5407 was ranked 17th with an average qual score of 143.00 which was higher than the winner's. When they combined the awards for two different fields, they did not think it through. The award should have gone to the rookie team with the higher average.

[Steven Donow]

Plenty of things to go in both threads, but my initial though about Champs itself is the level to which badges/lanyards were regulated.

For those who weren't there, essentially everyone was required to wear a namebadge similar to a volunteer badge. Enforcement of this was incredibly strict. I saw many students, in groups all wearing the same team clothing, get seperated from their groups and not allowed through certain doors because they didn't have their badge. Even an, 'I'm going to the stands, my badge is there' was responded to with a, 'You need to go down to the registration desk'. Not to mention the fact that they were only allowing one direction at a time Saturday morning between the pits and stands, even going as far as cutting off teams from walking together...

[orangemoore]

Plenty of things to go in both threads, but my initial though about Champs itself is the level to which badges/lanyards were regulated.

For those who weren't there, essentially everyone was required to wear a namebadge similar to a volunteer badge. Enforcement of this was incredibly strict. I saw many students, in groups all wearing the same team clothing, get seperated from their groups and not allowed through certain doors because they didn't have their badge. Even an, 'I'm going to the stands, my badge is there' was responded to with a, 'You need to go down to the registration desk'. Not to mention the fact that they were only allowing one direction at a time Saturday morning between the pits and stands, even going as far as cutting off teams from walking together...

Does anyone know what prompted the change so that everyone had to have a lanyard?

[blazingbronco18]

The Qualifying Average system made for a brutal eliminations bracket. Especially at events like MSC or the Championship, it is very difficult to recover from a single bad match - I like best 2 out of 3 because you can get one mulligan.


I agree. There was no recovery, no way to get rid of a bad match unless you advanced in ranking. It was an issue my team ran into during our second regional as well. Due to the lack of the 2 out of 3, it felt like every alliance was cheering for all other alliances to do poorly so they could advance. I hope we no longer have to use averages to determine rank. I look forward to going back to the 3v3 format.

[Louis_]

[LIST]
I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit.


People actually cheered when those stacks fell over? That's just terrible, I'm so sorry. You guys are an amazing team and constantly inspire me, I hope that doesn't bring you guys down too much.

[dudefise]

Although I wasn't with a team for most of the season, I was able to make it to a competition and was there for the first day or so.

It seemed to me like this was a much more technical challenge with precision and repeatability the key goals. For the drivers, I felt that this year was just as challenging as any other year.

Construction wise, it was much more challenging - slight timing delays or malfunctions couldn't be compensated for by "let's go play defense lol".

I felt the real losers from no defense were the crowd. While the FRC students all get excited about whatever and will cheer and yell for their team (or other teams) this wasn't exciting to an untrained observer.

Despite the increased elegance in design required, I would not want to bring a grandparent or non-indoctrinated student to RR. It's simply not exciting to watch.

I strongly felt that FIRST was going the right direction after Lunacy - with Breakaway, Rebound Rumble, Ultimate Ascent and Aerial Assist being very simple to understand games for the crowd. Flying stuff is also entertaining, which is good.

I also felt that this game detracted from the ideas of coopertition and gracious professionalism - in many cases, it was clear who would move on in a given elimination matchup. If your team made a mistake, you were done, and from that point on silently hoping for another team to make a worse mistake. Even if lower-seeded teams got through more often, it wasn't through superior strategy, just opposition errors.

I also felt that it was boring on account of a lack of buzzer-beaters and other dramatic finishes. I don't really mind the whole no-endgame thing so much as the fact that the match is pretty well determined within the first few seconds of canburgling.

If the goal is inspiration and recognition within STEM-interested individuals, this game is good. But to interest and attract those outside, we need real, hard-hitting defense in my opinion. Making FRC appeal to those who aren't otherwise interested in STEM or even education on the whole is a big deal.

I didn't really like this game. In fact, I would hesitate to call it a game since there is no direct competition. I understand that some people really liked it and I have no problem with that view at all - I've always been defensive-minded as a student and now as an alum who helps out on occasion. For me, this simply wasn't near the best game FIRST could produce; I felt that they regressed in the areas I consider key. To improve next year, I feel that they could

1) Bring back defense, even if it is limited. If robot-to-robot contact can't be a thing for whatever reason, why not goalkeeping?

2)No more average scores, this hurts teams who do well but have one off match

3)Flying objects/big, fast stuff is always entertaining. Putting a new twist on it shouldn't be hard.

[SciBorg Dave]

The game was terrible to watch - by far the worst I have seen during my 15 years of participation in FRC. The only periods of excitement were the first few seconds (and occasionally the ensuing tug of war) and whenever a stack would topple.
The game challenge was too difficult for the average team. The median robot in 2013 or 2014 was far more inspiring and effective than the median robot in 2015.
The can race was way too important as a result of there not being enough cans in the game, and the resulting "arms race" absolutely burnt out a lot of teams.
Cheesecake was taken to a ridiculous new extreme this year. I want to only have to worry about building one robot in order to be competitive.
Litter, upside-down totes, and totes on the step were just unnecessary clutter that only ever lowered the level of play.
Without W-L-T or any form of (non-canburglar, non-noodle throwing) defense, outgunned teams have nothing to cheer for but for their competitors to mess up. I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit. I do not blame them (and take the cheering as a gesture of respect for our robot), but it was a little hard to swallow and to explain to our students. I wish the incentives did not align this way.
The Qualifying Average system made for a brutal eliminations bracket. Especially at events like MSC or the Championship, it is very difficult to recover from a single bad match - I like best 2 out of 3 because you can get one mulligan.
The 607 team Championship felt very crowded and chaotic. Team registration and badging took too long. There were major traffic jams in the tunnels on Thursday morning and again before eliminations.
I was once again left wondering why some of the robots I saw were at the Championship while other, far more effective robots remained home.
Once again, FIRST totally dropped the ball on making sure people can follow events from home. The Championship streams were awful, and scores and rankings weren't event updating through most of the weekend. It is 2015. Why do PNW, FiM, dozens of regionals, or Chezy Champs have better streams than the FIRST Championship?


I think you need to go to Championship event-The Thread "Videos from CMP"-It has your QF match, I do not think that is cheering, I think it was shock. When we lost in the semi-finals we got cheered for a great effort. The cheering was for the match not your lose.

[Orthofort]

1) Bring back defense, even if it is limited. If robot-to-robot contact can't be a thing for whatever reason, why not goalkeeping?

This is something that I think should be considered more. A lot of people complain about robot-to-robot contact, and especially in the case of 2014, trying to regulate this contact in an objective way. With this game it's made me realize that it's not that the alliances are divided that is bad, it's that there basically no interaction between the alliances. The can races were the only interaction, and they we're probably the most exciting part to watch, ignoring that they decided matches.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that keeping the robots divided can be fine, but there needs to be interaction. There can be interaction with more goalkeeping. I was initially excited about the goalie role last year, but disappointed that it was so uncommonly used, mostly because it wasn't useful a lot of the time.

FIRST was trying to mitigate all the complaints about Aerial Assault, but instead of removing interaction, make it more of a goalie role. I don't have a lot of experience with past games, so I don't really know how often a goalie-role, rather than a robot just bumping into another and trying to block its path, has existed, except maybe 2013.

[Louis_]

Another thing which I think many of you will find unfair is the dealing with snow days. My team lost 12 DAYS to snow. It was absolutely awful, but we were proud of what we were still able to accomplish. I'd like something for teams that have that much trouble, as I know many teams in New England will feel the same way.

[Qbot2640]

This isn't so much a lesson-learned from 2015, as a common sense suggestion (In my opinion, anyway). This year FIRST officially recognized Wednesday as the starting date for each Regional...in that same spirit PLEASE let teams set up their pits on Wednesday night. Keep the robot bagged...but get everything set in its place so teams can hit the ground running Thursday morning.

[JB987]

+1+1+1!

[Koko Ed]

This game was pretty meh til the elims started. I wished they would have founf a use for the yellow totes outside of autonomous.

The Can o' Worms at the champs for queing was not my favorite thing in the world but with alot of tweeking we made it work and that made me happy. It'll be much better next year.

The team badges were a disster! There were people using them to come down to the field and the stadium staff who were so good at keeping unauthorized people out let a ton of people in and just added more stress to the volunteers.

The paper airplanes need to stop! They make us look like unruly fool and make the field look like it's being played in a garbage dump! Is this how little you think of FIRST?

We need more districts!!!

[Munchskull]

We need more districts!!!

I will second, third and fourth this. Districts this year and last year in the PNW have been amazing (with some select exceptions) in terms of quality robots that teams have built. What Autodesk has done in PNW CMP really makes it feel big and important.

Just my two cents.

[buckskinner1776]

Autonomous was good. It's not necessarily meant to be easy. Programmers spent weeks of late nights working it out and pushing mechanical to improve things that were an issue. I didn't see it as being make or break but a definite bonus. There were plenty of teams in finals that couldn't do it.

Taking take our thirteen hours to run division finals and Einstein was crazy. That's a long day of doing nothing when you're out of it if your going to hang out and watch. Then nine hours of travel after that.

The average of the scores outright sucked. Teams made it to the finals that really should not our would not have been there on their own. This dilutes the championship. Adding more teams has already done this and will again when they split to two locations. The top teams are there already. At that point they will be adding more teams that are not top teams. More diluting of the quality. If they would like others to have the big experience, then improve the quality of states or regionals. Cmp was a big let down after msc. It was like going through divisional in week two again. There were some more good teams to watch, but many that need some work yet.

Maybe IRI will become the real CMP without the first endorsement.

[buckskinner1776]

Does anyone have a link to the bad lip reading video. That was funny and the kids are looking for it. Thanks!

[redlau]

It was a very fun game overall to watch and be a part of, however I felt that this game should have had an endgame. The end game really shows which teams can push the envelope from good to great

Just my two cents

[neely_2052]

FIRST needs to put their long standing teams at a higher priority than mass expansion, and they need to hold some real feedback sessions with teams or an advisory panel of teams, because it seems they have a mission of what they're trying to do, and it doesn't always align with what the teams want and need. And I don't mean this about the two champs thing, but I speak on other factors. They need more integration into education.

Also, the timing of the Chairman's Award and other top awards needs to be communicated clearly, before any music festival or dance party, and certainly before everyone leaves.

I completely agree with the Chairman's Award thing. Our team was not going to stay for the concert, but we felt like it was really important for us to watch the Chairman's winners. Unfortunately, we didn't get to because they were very slow at starting. We probably sat there for close to an hour before deciding to leave. Everyone was exhausted and sitting in the stands for another couple hours didn't help.

[Mike Marandola]

The Higest Rookie Seed Award for Carver-Curie went to Team 5442 which was ranked 16th on Carver with an average qual score of 142.90. The higest rookie seed on Curie Team 5407 was ranked 17th with an average qual score of 143.00 which was higher than the winner's. When they combined the awards for two different fields, they did not think it through. The award should have gone to the rookie team with the higher average.

I don't think so because averages are dependent on the field and the teams on that field.

[cmrnpizzo14]

The Higest Rookie Seed Award for Carver-Curie went to Team 5442 which was ranked 16th on Carver with an average qual score of 142.90. The higest rookie seed on Curie Team 5407 was ranked 17th with an average qual score of 143.00 which was higher than the winner's. When they combined the awards for two different fields, they did not think it through. The award should have gone to the rookie team with the higher average.

It's the highest rookie seed award, not the highest rookie score. In previous years it was the exact same way with W/L (actually was worse in previous years since W/L could be more easily luck based).

[brrian27]

This year my only official interaction with FRC was volunteering as field reset at the Utah Regional, and chaperoning my old team at the Championship.

---
Volunteering for the first time was nice, but could have been more organized with instruction of what to do and where to go. (But, I was late on day 1 due to a ~1 hour drive, so can't complain too much.)

---
I had a great time being with my team and old friends at Champs, but was pretty disappointed in many things. For context, I have only gone to Champs one other time (2013).

First, the opening ceremonies on Thursday morning. In 2013 that was a nice way to start off the event and feel like it's "real." My team skipped this year's opening ceremonies because it was just another thing after a long day.

For the webcast, just do one overall camera view. While watching it in the pits on the big screen, we could hardly see any detail at all.

Also, I disliked how the division finals/champions awards were handed out. My team's alliance made it to finals of Archimedes, and handing out the medals/trophies just seemed rushed. It was just kind of walking down and high-fiving the refs (after a controversial call that knocked us out too..) and didn't have a special feeling the kids deserve.

Oh, one other small thing is that the fourth alliance drive teams in the division finals should be brought out to the field to shake hands. We were a fourth member, and it was just kind of disappointing to not see the students get any recognition as being part of the alliance.

And oh, then there's the Einstein event/closing ceremonies. I was very surprised and disappointed at this.

First off, start things on time please. I watched our division playoffs, then went to the pits and we had enough time to pack everything, etc and when we all came back, we still had to wait a very long time for Einstein to start. First needs to better plan the timing of events.

Of course on Einstein, there were all the A/V problems. The terrible echo, split-view on the webcast, bad camera angles, spending way too long on camera on individuals in the crowd. Those all can and should be fixed easily.

Then, besides the matches, I was just not entertained much. My idea of a good show does not involve sub-par music, and jokes that aren't that funny. Step up the performance and make it more professional. Have entertainment that appeals to an audience of anyone.

We didn't stay for closing ceremonies, but moving everyone to the opposite side of the dome just isn't a good idea. Additionally, I heard that Dean talked for almost two hours, which is just not okay. His message is important, but again things need to be on schedule and entertaining. Also, Chairman's should be given more recognition than they were (as we, and many others, had already left and not even seen the award).

---
Anyway, sorry if I sound cynical. I had a great time at the two events I attended, and hope that FRC can continue to get better.

[Chris is me]

This was the worst game I have ever played, and perhaps the worst game in FRC history. I don't think it's impossible to make a decent game with no defense. I don't think a decent stacking game is impossible. But this wasn't it.

Of the many fundamentally broken aspects of this game's design, the one that bothered me the very most is the strong disincentive for specialization. Doing "one thing well" was all but a competitive death sentence, and I think it will take years to recover from it. One of the greatest subtleties of almost every FRC game is that if you were smart and stayed within your resources / limitations, you could create a winning robot by mastering just a few critical aspects of the game instead of being a jack of all trades. Teams that over-reach who felt everything was necessary to be competitive often struggled, and those who learned the important lessons of setting priorities and knowing one's own limitations found incredible success. This year turned that on its head. If you couldn't manipulate both totes and cans, if you couldn't get a can with a five stack underneath it, you just weren't going to win events (without something odd like a can burgular, specific metagame needs, etc). Now a generation of students and teams have been taught that the only way to make it is to try and do everything. We'll see an increase in teams over-reaching for years, and FRC is worse off for it.

Obviously, the presence of a chokehold strategy in the form of the center can race was quite problematic. I'm sure others will touch on this point extensively.

The tournament structure, specifically average scores with no forgiveness for any mistakes, was atrocious. It's robotics - things go wrong. Consistency should be important, but if the first second of the first match can make your entire elimination run completely worthless, something needs to change. I never want to see the morale of a team so quickly killed again. I never want to have to make students play a match that they know is utterly pointless again. This must not be the new norm.

I'll have to post other things I have (including positives) later, I'm already procrastinating too much. But I just want to say - I have never, ever, ever seen an FRC game cause more of FIRST's most dedicated and respected mentors to reconsider their future involvement than this one. We can't survive more than one year like this.

[Goldenspeedster]

This is not true at all. Driver control is only so useful. Lots of teams take advantage of sensors to automate stacking and scoring routines, feedback control is very useful in giving a smooth driving experience, and providing an easy to use interface for the drivers to use is essential for top teams.

Even still, semi-autonomous actions only get so complex. 90% of the time spent making a PID loop is really just tuning three variables, since it's not even a dozen lines of code (using WPIlib, that is). I would agree that programming needs more emphasis, seeing as autonomous is the one time programmers get to take risks. I also think some of the point values were a bit low. Only 8 points for a container set?

Autonomous in 2013 and 2014, in my opinion, were nearly satisfactory, but a bit more complexity might be nice.


The tournament structure, specifically average scores with no forgiveness for any mistakes, was atrocious. It's robotics - things go wrong. Consistency should be important, but if the first second of the first match can make your entire elimination run completely worthless, something needs to change. I never want to see the morale of a team so quickly killed again. I never want to have to make students play a match that they know is utterly pointless again. This must not be the new norm.


Although this may be true for quarterfinals, you should take a look at the 1st alliance in semifinals on Archimedes: Semis 2, 4, and 6 (http://www.thebluealliance.com/event/2015arc)

[Oblarg]

Of the many fundamentally broken aspects of this game's design, the one that bothered me the very most is the strong disincentive for specialization. Doing "one thing well" was all but a competitive death sentence, and I think it will take years to recover from it.

This can't be repeated often enough. As a mentor for a team with limited means, this has been the design philosophy I have stressed every single year, and it has served us very well. It simply was not possible this year, and the result was that our design process was very much stressed and our end result suffered.

This game had two game pieces, neither of which were easy to manipulate, and both of which had to be manipulated in order to score. It was simply *too hard* to build a "minimum competitive concept" bot, and I saw *lots* of teams suffering from this.

[Glacier]

Well to start they need to make autonomous less important, this year and last year if you missed in auto the game was over and that is not fun for that alliance or anyone watching. Going into the finals of Einstein, it was obvious that Newton was going to use every tote. As soon as they got three cans in tbe first match it was all over. In the second match, there was an even split but Hopper did not get their auto so everyone knew it was over then as well.

I also feel like far too many things were left to the refs discretion this year. Refs need to make calls in regard to penalties but they should not get to decide what scores and what does not. At the end of the season I was left wondering so many things about what counts and what does not. Can I be touching the auton stack if I am not supporting it? Does the same apply to last second cans on stacks? What does fully supported even mean? Now the point is not that there are no objective answers to these questions but that refs can and have given me different answers.

Also transport configuration was a cool idea that was implemented so poorly that it sucked what little fun this game had to offer out before the match even began. Frank said at the drivers meeting at Champs that teams have 1 minute to setup as soon as they are allowed on the field. This is however 'just a guideline' and a ridiculous one at that. To be clear, our team used every second of that minute to just unfold our robot normally. Now add that 5 robots are moving around you along with a plethora of volunteer carrying stacks of totes around and you would be lucky if robots were ready after three minutes.

The tournament structure was awful, it just does not feel rewarding making it to the finals and losing. In all honesty it felt like a challenge more than a competition and I was pretty sure that the 'c' in frc is not for coopertition.

FIRST should realize they can keep it simple, there is no need to add unnecessary game pieces that no one wants and are worth far too many points (litter).

Finally, for the love of bot just let there be some defense. This game was so boring to watch, or should I say wait becuase all I did was wait for one side to mess up and then stop caring becuase the match was over if auton had not already decided that.

I'm not going to say your many points of emphasis are based on a feeling of bias or not a feeling of bias. But I will add that the FIRST game-makers need to factor in a ratio system for point values (not saying they haven't). The potential for a large point value in autonomous should be considered important and it needs to be. I mean they are robots, robots should be programmed, hence their given name. But I feel it quite unnecessary to put important game changers (Recycling Cans) in the hands of autonomous. I will also agree with saying if a game is decided in the first 15 or so seconds then why compete? I mean a stack of six without a can is a measly 12 points to a stack of 6 with a can, regardless of litter. If one alliance has already grabbed an uneven amount of cans in their favor before tele-op begins the maximum point value for the opposing team would be 258 points. That 258 being a maxed out score for that alliance. Really good alliances would only score 204 if they really were good at trowing litter. So if you create a game designed like a see-saw you will find very uneven possibilities. With a point range of 204 you would be doomed during playoffs on the Einstein fields.

Although its purely speculation that a team could consistently snag all four cans off the step during autonomous, it raises the question if they had been able to do that they wouldn't be matched.

But this is all post season talk and the what-ifs about the spontaneous possibilities that could have happened during the Recycle Rush season.

[Jardanium]

I will flat-out say it, the game was boring. It was missing the defense and the high-flying action that games of years past had. Stacks of boxes aren't nearly as impressive as robots hanging from pyramids or a bridge balanced with three bots on it. Recycle Rush just dropped the ball when it came to creating an exciting spectator sport.

This year just had a different atmosphere during the competitions. Our bot was a mid-low ranger this year, and due to the average score rankings, many times we felt like a hindrance to our alliance partners rather than a help. At least in previous years when our robot had an issue with performing a task, we could make it up with another. (i.e last year when our robot's catapult system broke, we played defense) This year however, it was either, you stack, or you're in the way, and that definitely needs to change for next year.

The early season was riddled with problems. The Northern Lights Regional during Week 1 ran so far behind because of problems with the field, that members of my team fell asleep in the stands on several occasions. I understand this is a problem with Week 1 in general, but it became quite ridiculous having practice matches end an hour and a half later than they should have.

Livestreams were a real let-down this year. It was real exciting last year to have won an award at a regional, and then have people from back home watching the stream wishing congratulations. This was missing this year, as the quality at many of the events, especially the Championship, was poor. I've heard a lot about the PNW having fantastic A/V, and if that is the case, that sort of quality should be the standard for events. (and I stress this again, especially the Championship.)

Now I move onto the biggest let-down of all, the Championship.

FIRST certainly didn't prove to me that they could handle 600 teams, let alone the 607 that ended up attending. The event was unorganized, chaotic, and half the time my team and I had no idea what was going on.

It started with the identification badges, which my team had no idea about. It wasn't well publicized that these were required, and could be picked up on Wednesday, so most didn't bother. The reason for these (as we found out later) was security reasons, as a week ago there was an apparent bomb threat at the Old Courthouse building. If anything, they're a great souvenir!

Next came a problem several other teams in the Hopper/Newton area faced, as several things were stolen after the pits closed on Thursday. We specifically lost a drive computer, (thankfully Team 1816 graciously helped us out!) but other teams reported missing laptops and other personal items that were left in the pits, areas you'd think would be safe and secure.

Then came the divisional award ceremonies, which for reasons I still don't understand, were lumped together. In every right of the word, the eight groups of teams were divisions, as they had their own fields, finals, and representation on Einstein. So why place the two nearby subdivisions together strictly for awards? I understand the reasoning when it comes to an award like Engineering Inspiration, as that qualifies you for next year's championship, but for other awards like Team Spirit and Excellence in Engineering, there is no reason why they couldn't have been sub-divisional awards. I don't feel this combining of subdivisions was communicated very well either, as many people seemed to be surprised by this.

The merchandise lines were way too long. (sometimes an hour or longer) The clothing area of the store was a real let-down as all you could get were $50 jackets, or iron-on custom t-shirts.

The paper airplanes need to stop. It got way too out of hand this year, as people draped toilet paper from the top level, ripped up programs into tiny pieces and dumped them over, and threw other objects like water bottles and glowsticks. It looked nothing more than a massive spring break concert, and created a huge mess. Having sponsors encouraging this activity isn't good either.

I don't know about anyone else, but this year Einstein kind of lost it's charm for me. Not having the massive LED background, and trading it for two fields sort of made it seem like the qualification rounds with everyone watching. Last year they had a lot more going on between matches, (Awards, Speeches, Performances) and that seemed to be missing this year by separating everything. I personally wished the Einstein field was located on the side with the stage, as then you could have had performances, speeches and awards in-between the action.

The finale was a let down. Last year, we had a carnival, free food, dance lounge, and a game lounge. This year, a DJ that stayed on stage way too long, and two acts performed that very few people even knew about.

This ends the long list of complaints that grew over this season. I feel of all things the Championship really needs to improve. If FIRST cannot prove that they can hold 600+ teams and maintain "championship experience", then how will they be able to maintain two championship events with a total of 800+ teams in years to come?

[Glacier]

I will flat-out say it, the game was boring. It was missing the defense and the high-flying action that games of years past had. Stacks of boxes aren't nearly as impressive as robots hanging from pyramids or a bridge balanced with three bots on it. Recycle Rush just dropped the ball when it came to creating an exciting spectator sport.

This year just had a different atmosphere during the competitions. Our bot was a mid-low ranger this year, and due to the average score rankings, many times we felt like a hindrance to our alliance partners rather than a help. At least in previous years when our robot had an issue with performing a task, we could make it up with another. (i.e last year when our robot's catapult system broke, we played defense) This year however, it was either, you stack, or you're in the way, and that definitely needs to change for next year.

The early season was riddled with problems. The Northern Lights Regional during Week 1 ran so far behind because of problems with the field, that members of my team fell asleep in the stands on several occasions. I understand this is a problem with Week 1 in general, but it became quite ridiculous having practice matches end an hour and a half later than they should have.

Livestreams were a real let-down this year. It was real exciting last year to have won an award at a regional, and then have people from back home watching the stream wishing congratulations. This was missing this year, as the quality at many of the events, especially the Championship, was poor. I've heard a lot about the PNW having fantastic A/V, and if that is the case, that sort of quality should be the standard for events. (and I stress this again, especially the Championship.)

Now I move onto the biggest let-down of all, the Championship.

FIRST certainly didn't prove to me that they could handle 600 teams, let alone the 607 that ended up attending. The event was unorganized, chaotic, and half the time my team and I had no idea what was going on.

It started with the identification badges, which my team had no idea about. It wasn't well publicized that these were required, and could be picked up on Wednesday, so most didn't bother. The reason for these (as we found out later) was security reasons, as a week ago there was an apparent bomb threat at the Old Courthouse building. If anything, they're a great souvenir!

Next came a problem several other teams in the Hopper/Newton area faced, as several things were stolen after the pits closed on Thursday. We specifically lost a drive computer, (thankfully Team 1816 graciously helped us out!) but other teams reported missing laptops and other personal items that were left in the pits, areas you'd think would be safe and secure.

Then came the divisional award ceremonies, which for reasons I still don't understand, were lumped together. In every right of the word, the eight groups of teams were divisions, as they had their own fields, finals, and representation on Einstein. So why place the two nearby subdivisions together strictly for awards? I understand the reasoning when it comes to an award like Engineering Inspiration, as that qualifies you for next year's championship, but for other awards like Team Spirit and Excellence in Engineering, there is no reason why they couldn't have been sub-divisional awards. I don't feel this combining of subdivisions was communicated very well either, as many people seemed to be surprised by this.

The merchandise lines were way too long. (sometimes an hour or longer) The clothing area of the store was a real let-down as all you could get were $50 jackets, or iron-on custom t-shirts.

The paper airplanes need to stop. It got way too out of hand this year, as people draped toilet paper from the top level, ripped up programs into tiny pieces and dumped them over, and threw other objects like water bottles and glowsticks. It looked nothing more than a massive spring break concert, and created a huge mess. Having sponsors encouraging this activity isn't good either.

I don't know about anyone else, but this year Einstein kind of lost it's charm for me. Not having the massive LED background, and trading it for two fields sort of made it seem like the qualification rounds with everyone watching. Last year they had a lot more going on between matches, (Awards, Speeches, Performances) and that seemed to be missing this year by separating everything. I personally wished the Einstein field was located on the side with the stage, as then you could have had performances, speeches and awards in-between the action.

The finale was a let down. Last year, we had a carnival, free food, dance lounge, and a game lounge. This year, a DJ that stayed on stage way too long, and two acts performed that very few people even knew about.

This ends the long list of complaints that grew over this season. I feel of all things the Championship really needs to improve. If FIRST cannot prove that they can hold 600+ teams and maintain "championship experience", then how will they be able to maintain two championship events with a total of 800+ teams in years to come?

I think you pretty much summed up the entire year, I enjoyed reading what you had to say.

I will say though the lag between matches was morose and boring at times. This problem could have been rectified with activities for the crowd or just basic announcer and crowd interaction especially at championship. As well as the speed of robot set-up and field reset (of which I was a part of). The field crew and FTA's definitely played a major role in how fast the matches were played.

[Rachel Lim]

- The game. If it's even accurate to call it that, since Recycle Rush was way more of a challenge than a game. Specifically:
- It wasn't a good spectator game. My sister only liked watching noodles being thrown after seeing parts of Alamo, SVR, and champs. (In general, watching stuff being thrown is more fun than watching stuff being pushed around.)
- The lack of defense, and alliance interaction.
- The chokehold strategy, and matches decided in the first <0.2sec.
- The all-or-nothing points, especially in autonomous.
- The multiple game pieces, both of which were necessary--using one and doing well was almost impossible.
- The unscored litter points. Everything about it--the fact that only HPs could score it and that it has basically no point and yet could disable the best robots--was frustrating.
- The inability for third robots to contribute much. I'm not against cheesecaking from any side of it, but it would be nice to have a game where it's not required to win.
- Difficulty for teams to score. Litter points were often the majority of points scored in earlier events. The importance of containers, the easiness to knock over stacks, and the all/nothing scores made many low scores.
- The focus on working alone. There were a few alliances where teams would work together to stack/cap, but the most successful ones just did cycles by themselves.

- Average points for elims advancement. I'm divided about how I feel about if for quals, but for elims it's just brutal. One match can completely ruin a team's chance of moving on, and there is no way to make it up.

- Mecanum. We've done it once, and I hope we never do it again. It's confirmed what I thought, and much more. I never would have expected us to get sucked into the "mecanum trap*," but we did, and it wasn't fun. I'm looking forward to the return of defense so we won't do this again. That said, it was nice to see it well implemented by many teams.
* My name for the idea that omni-directional movement is important enough that spending time on a drivetrain that we've never tried before, and will spend a significant amount of time on, will help us in the end. (Okay, it's just team-specific, but it was something I learned this year...)

- Champs webcast and the whole split screen thing. We tried to watch a few of our matches from the pits, and it was very, very difficult to tell what was going on.

- Paper airplanes. This really needs to stop. Period.

- The split champs announcement, how it was done, the response to it, and the town hall meeting (from what I've read/watched, I wasn't there in person). Basically the whole attitude about it, their unwillingness to listen, and the complete lack of any survey beforehand.


In all, 2015 was an interesting year, and one that I learned a lot in, but one I'm very happy is ending. Good bye 2015. Good bye Recycle Rush. Good bye and good riddance.

[ThePaulitician]

This is all for FRC:

-I want to see FIRST do more robot durability challenges. For example, I would always love to see a hockey challenge (one on real ice or some sort of friction-lacking surface if possible) because if it is similar to the real life sport like in the NHL and at the IIHF championships, it would be very much into cooperating with teammates and strategy. Also, I know it is sort of risky and difficult, but if defense is allowed, I would like teams to focus more on durability and maybe even having "skating" robots as opposed to standard drive systems. And if defense is allowed to a certain extent, teams will need to build robots that can take checks, hits, and deflect pucks like ice hockey players. Although it would be a very big change, it would be a challenge that is harder to "exploit" if you know what I mean.

-Overall, I want to see challenges that make teams use their teammates and not "take advantage of the game" all by themselves. I understand that teams are allowed to do and build as they please but I mean in 2013 when SPAM (FRC 180) sat at the feeder station in South Florida and just kept sniping disc after disc, it seemed like it was not even fun or competitive anymore. I mean for me that would not be fun unless I was the human player (which I am now), and the drive team can't have fun with one control in use. I feel like a hockey challenge would be so cool though. Like especially if they implement powerplays and penalty kills where teams would lose bots temporarily due to penalty infractions. If in any way a hockey or similar challenge is done, it would be amazing. I would love to see challenges that require utilizing teammates.

-One thing I noticed about this year (especially at championships) was that there were too many game pieces and it delayed the game flow and game play. Although so many volunteers present, the re-configuration of gamepieces took a few minutes and it was even worse when there were scoring disputes because the field was closed until referees resolved it, holding up the field staff longer.

-The bandwidth for the field needs to be increased or re-allocated in some way. We originally had a camera on our robot at our first regional, but the bandwidth of the field only allowed us to process 7 fps, which was not even useful. So we scrapped the camera idea as a whole. The FTA and field staff already do good enough of a job, but if they could use more bandwidth, please do.

-I feel that because every year FRC has the clear, frame perimeter of the field as a way to make the field bound, FIRST should make money with this as they do in professional sports. Dean says FIRST is a sport of the future, so why not place ads there for companies. Although it may seem like an executive decision that I am in no way qualified to make or suggest, the money they make can be used to reduce costs to teams and save everyone money.

-About the two championships idea... It is a great idea but it is in the wrong places. It is great to see that FIRST is trying to accommodate to people from all over the world, but Houston and Detroit are the worst places to do it. It seems to be a North/South facilitator, which is reasonable as there are many teams from Canada, the Northeast, and Michigan of course. But in the South, everyone is so far apart. In South Florida, the closest team to us is 20 miles away. I would suggest doing an East/West duo of cities. Detroit is such a run down city that unfortunately does not have the means to rejuvenate. In St. Louis every hotel was booked within 20 miles in every direction from the EJD. If this shifts to Detroit, you can't book hotels in the east as you would be in the Great Lakes. I also feel that inclement weather could prevent flights and mess up competition scheduling. Not to mention, with the mass amounts of people coming into town, how are there going to be enough hotels to facilitate to everyone? I'm not saying this out of paranoia of being in dangerous areas, but in Detroit, the entire west side is slowly becoming a ghost town. Are teams going to have to stay in the abandoned houses or are they going to have to stay 1 hour west in Livonia, Ann Arbor, etc?

-Also, these recent competitions have not been the best to demonstrate with. Recycle Rush and Aerial Assist were awful for us in demonstrating. Our team could make the fields out of wood, but we never demo in areas with enough space. On top of that, this year, we were invited to meet some senators and legislators in Tallahassee (our state capitol) and I cannot tell you how embarrassed I felt when we showed them a game with monotonously colored totes and trash cans. I was ready to apologize to them personally. And as if that was not bad enough, spectators from all around were watching us on the elevated hill that the capitol sits on. Yes it was good that it is attracting eyes and it is hilarious for us students, but to adults and especially people who actually have the political power to enhance this program, the past two years robots were awful for showing off to people not familiar with the program.

-Most importantly, I know that Dean Kamen cannot attend every competition, but please make efforts for him to. My team saw him in Atlanta at Peachtree and the entire philosophy of FRCs were completely changed with one 30 minute speech. in my opinion, Dean is such a realist; he realizes our struggles with money and the reality of only having a 4-5% chance of actually winning a regional. Some teams out there, especially those in Florida, take this WAY too seriously and are too harsh on themselves and the other teams. I love the competition atmosphere but every robot does not need to be considered "overpowered" or "useless." Dean's speech at Peachtree taught me that at competitions, you should really evaluate your team in terms of competition as looking at what people are missing out on both at the regional and people who do not compete in FIRST. Your robot is so "you." It is unique to the team, whether it be in skill, design, or cosmetics.

Thank you to everyone who made this season another amazing success! You all really changed my life this year. It feels so invigorating to have gone to championships for a sport I was finally good at.

[Hjelstrom]

Well I feel like we are pretty good about only standing when they are announcing our team and a quick cheer when the match is over, but if we have ever stood in your way while you were scouting a qual, you have my sincerest apologies.

Its true! Jenny yelled at me a couple times when I stood up during the competition! Sorry about that! :-D

[Alan Anderson]

Now I move onto the biggest let-down of all, the Championship.

FIRST certainly didn't prove to me that they could handle 600 teams, let alone the 607 that ended up attending. The event was unorganized, chaotic, and half the time my team and I had no idea what was going on.

It started with the identification badges, which my team had no idea about. It wasn't well publicized that these were required, and could be picked up on Wednesday, so most didn't bother.

It sounds like your problems with the Championship start with your team not keeping up with the information made available in advance. How would you have preferred to receive the word that everyone would need badges?

[Jardanium]

It sounds like your problems with the Championship start with your team not keeping up with the information made available in advance. How would you have preferred to receive the word that everyone would need badges?

I feel like more announcement and signage about badges on Wednesday would've cleared up the confusion. I personally wasn't at the convention center on Wednesday, but what I did hear from the reps and mentor that went over was that they didn't know or hear about everyone needing badges. (if an announcement was made, the sounds of load in and pit set-up may have drowned it out)

I just felt quite out of the loop this year when it came to events and happenings. I had no idea that Scholarship Row was moved into the same building as the Innovation Faire, nor had any certainty as to where the Einstein matches were to be located until I saw a massive congregation move toward the Archimedes-Tesla side of the Dome. I'm sure part of this is me being oblivious, (and believe me, I sure can be sometimes) but perhaps more finalized scheduling and locations information would've been great in the registration packet/folder that all teams received, so at least mentors could be in the loop.

[kgargiulo]

+1
And for Championships, get a broadcast like the one for the Michigan State Championship going on Saturday. MSC is incredible to watch, even with this year's game due to the incredible production value put into the event.

This. Although the thread name is "the negative" I want to pick up on MSC as a positive example to contrast to.

I was stunned by the high quality of the MSC broadcast. The video resolution, the angles, the field of view, the commentators... it was all incredibly professionally done and a credit to the people who arranged it and did the work. I'm in the "great engineering challenge, weak spectator sport" camp regarding this year's game, but the MSC broadcast even made a positive difference on that front.

My team was on Curie this year and for quite a while at the start of Quals there was no field audio. Period. In Q1 the robots started auto and no one off the field knew it was coming. The audio on Curie sometimes alternated between deafening and inaudible, but once it was fixed it was generally ok. I appreciate that the production team must have had to work hard to fix an unanticipated problem that somehow got past testing. Anyone who's worked on a robot understands that pressure and frustration. However a working PA system has to be table stakes when we've got people on line and in the stands who we are trying to get interested in FIRST and STEM as mentors, volunteers, sponsors, or any other angle.

Einstein audio was unintelligible (no exaggeration) in the upper decks for most of the intro speeches due to a severe echo. The echo was briefly fixed by making the volume nearly inaudible. Eventually it was sorted out, and the match calls were fine. I do not know if that early problem was limited to the dome, the area of the dome where we sat, or affected the webcasts as well. Same point as for Curie. That kind of problem with the blocking and tackling of the PA system doesn't help new people get hooked.


Disclosure: I work for PTC, a FIRST Crown Sponsor. Opinions expressed here are mine alone.

[Gdeaver]

Of all the negative posts, not one mention of the biggest change this year. A change that affected every team ---- The Roborio and the new control system.

[jnicho15]

Are teams going to have to stay in the abandoned houses or are they going to have to stay 1 hour west in Livonia, Ann Arbor, etc?
Hopefully some Canadian teams will stay in Windsor, if Customs is fast enogh.

[jnicho15]

Posting on mobile on the bus home so please forgive some typos.

1) Don't have the Einstien matches on one side of the stadium and closing ceremonies on the other. It messes with the flow of the event, adds more time delays go an already behind schedule (probably) evening, and moving a group of students through those crowds efficiently and safely is a nightmare. Also it left few people to cheer for this year's Champion Alliance as they got their award.

I think maybe it was intentional to prevent teams saving seats

[K-Dawg157]

Defense. Please bring Defense back. It allows the game to be more complex and fun to watch (as said previously) but it also gives new challenges to the drivers of the robots.

Without defense, all of the robots do the same basic things. You are either a canburgalar, or a stacker. Robots either stacked totes with cans already on top at the human feeder station, or they capped stacks that other robot s had already made. I personally never saw a litter sweeper robot, it was an add-on for others. And I never saw a wall like last year to try to block noodles.

Defense will make FIRST more fun to watch, more fun to participate in, and more challenging all around.

Other: Also, with the whole breaking Champs into two events, I have 2 problems with this. 1. Why would you go North and South? Sure, it's closer to Canada and Mexico for those teams, but teams on the eastern seaboard and western seaboard have to travel about the same distance... West and East would have made more sense IMO. and 2. Now this isn't going to be a true "Champs". It'll be a Northern Champion and Southern Champion. It won't be crowning true winning alliances.

[cmrnpizzo14]

- The game. If it's even accurate to call it that, since Recycle Rush was way more of a challenge than a game. Specifically:
*snip*
- Mecanum. We've done it once, and I hope we never do it again. It's confirmed what I thought, and much more. I never would have expected us to get sucked into the "mecanum trap*," but we did, and it wasn't fun. I'm looking forward to the return of defense so we won't do this again. That said, it was nice to see it well implemented by many teams.
* My name for the idea that omni-directional movement is important enough that spending time on a drivetrain that we've never tried before, and will spend a significant amount of time on, will help us in the end.

Your teams design decision is not part of the game. FIRST didn't mandate the drive like in 2009, you really could have chosen anything.

[Taylor]

My family and I were there as spectators on Saturday. No team affiliation, just there to watch some robots firsthand.
Having to go get lanyards & badges was an unnecessary complication. If FIRST is going to promote this event to the local public (city bus wraps, billboards, etc), why make it difficult to attend?

There was no signage or anything else explaining the game around the EJD - or the America's Center from what I could see. Given, my family and I knew what was going on, but once again, for random families coming in, it would have been distractingly confusing.

The game was what you make of it. In many respects, it reminds me of car racing. Some people really enjoy the strategy, the engineering, the teamwork employed; others think it's boring until somebody crashes.

The entire Einstein experience was embarrassing. I was glad I hadn't brought prospective team sponsors with me. Horrible audio, ridiculously long wait between matches, poorly executed crowd engagement routines. We ended up leaving before finals because my kids were bored. Seriously. If robots can't hold the attention of a 6-year-old boy, something isn't right.
Maybe it was because turnaround time, which was about 6-7 minutes during the season, was roughly half an hour?

I wonder how many teams missed their flights, had to pay an extra day for charter bus getting home late, or got home way after curfew because the Einstein event was so poorly managed and executed.

[The_ShamWOW88]

Reading through the thread, I agree with a lot of the comments and suggestions made so I won't make this a long reiteration. However, my feelings are as follows:

Recycle Rush - I won't go as far as saying this was the "WORST GAME IN THE HISTORY OF FIRST" because maybe those who are saying that weren't around for the "game that must not be named" in 2001 (although I know this point has been made). This year was better than that, 2009, 2003 and 2008 even (which is of my own opinion and I could spend an entire thread talking about just that). However, with that said, FIRST, I understand the idea behind it and that you are always trying new things and pushing boundaries but I have to say, you pushed a little too far this time. This was a glorified FIRST Lego League game minus the 100% autonomous but if this is the direction they're headed in then count me out. I just didn't feel the "Competition" in FIRST Robotics Competition. It didn't matter the "opposing" alliance's score in the moment (during Quals) so there was not motivation factor to try and "win". Not until Elims did both scores really factor into mine or the drivers' thinking.

I also saw no reason for a team to specialize in any one this this season, I saw no reason for actually working together as an alliance and as we got further into the higher levels of play, you really only needed two teams that could MAX stack or as close to MAX stack as possible to win and the third (or fourth for Champs) only needed to stay out of the way (again, my observation, not yours).

I hope this "Average Score" and no "W-L-T" is an experiment because the experiment didn't produce good results. Considering that, as far as we know, the FIRST design committee builds games years in advance, I sincerely hope they have settled on a traditional 3v3 game which takes into account teams' abilities to specialize and work as such, a team. Please, FIRST, if you do anything, stop the "no robot contact, no head-to-head" before it gets out of hand. It didn't work in 2001, it didn't work this year.

Outside of the game - I can't comment on Champs as a whole as my team did not attend. I don't think the stream was nearly as bad as it sounds, quality wise, but the angles provided (no full-field) and the insane amount of time sitting and waiting for things to start (just watching different teams dance) was crazy.

There's other opinions on the 2-champs split, etc. but I'll save those for the actual threads discussing those topics as it's just too much information for one post.

[planetbrilliant]

We ended up leaving before finals because my kids were bored. Seriously. If robots can't hold the attention of a 6-year-old boy, something isn't right.


Part of this might've been because, especially for a kid, there's not that much excitement in the game itself. The game this year was pretty boring to watch because it's the same thing over and over. I watched a live-stream of the finals at home and my eyes kept drifting to other screens (my tumblr dash, facebook, etc) in the set up I had because watching robots stack totes isn't that interesting, even if some do it faster than others.

The Einstein matches also started horribly late. I was worried I had gotten my timezones mixed up because they started like an hour and a half later than the scheduled time.

[MrForbes]

The autonomous part of the game was all or nothing. A few really good teams could get a tote stack or container set. But requiring all three teams to do the same thing to get auto points only works if there is only one possible thing to do. Having three possibilities makes it so there will almost never be three robots in a qualification match that do the same thing. We wasted too much time on auto before figuring this out.

[marshall]

Of all the negative posts, not one mention of the biggest change this year. A change that affected every team ---- The Roborio and the new control system.

I think that is a testament to the amount of effort that NI, WPI, CTRE, FIRST, and all of the beta teams put into testing it. There was a beta testing feedback conference/round table and it seems like the new control system is a massive improvement overall from the old. There are still some bugs to be worked out though.

Sorry, this is the negative thread... Umm, I guess we all had to learn how to use the new control system and that took time away from building... :confused:

[FrankJ]

I sped read the previous 6 pages so sorry if this is repetitive.

Fix the problem so the tracking app like spyder & blue alliance work in real time. Hard enough to track what was going on in my division let alone what was happening to friends in other divisions. Real time streaming for matches should just work. Having this stuff buggy kills the excitement we are trying to build for the competition. First is supposed to be the innovator in STEM. It is embarrassing.

Fix FMS connection issues. The wrong combination of robots on the field still breaks it. The robots are not the problem... They are the messenger.

Funny that the real autonomous battle was for the cans & not the initial points. (This is in the wrong place because I don't view as a negative.)

Time management for the First finial. The finial & closing ceremonies in general. Who thought shining bright lights into the spectators eyes was a good idea. I left after getting a headache.

[hardcopi]

The lanyards were for security. In case of an issue they wanted to have a method of telling those who belonged from those who did not. There were riots not that long ago, not that far from the center. First was understandably concerned about upping the security.

That said here is my list of gripes and whines:

Event was too large. Didn't feel as elite as last year and even that felt too big. Why not multi state championships that are like this and then a smaller championship that was less than 100 elite teams.

Moving from one end to the other caused a lot of rudeness and nastiness in the stands. We literally had our stuff tossed aside and one girl literally stood up to ask me what we should say to them and while she was standing in front of her seat someone shoved underneath her and sat down. Rather than cause an incident our team moved up 2 rows where there were plenty of seats available.

I assume it is to make the stands look more full, but that particular problem would have been alleviated a LOT by not choosing the smaller ends of the field and instead the nice long sides. Yes it would have looked less full, but it would have been a nicer event for all.

Cheesecaking has to go in its current iteration. I like helping other teams. We have done it many many times, but this year it has gotten to the point of ridiculousness. In the past it was to help a team enhance the work they had spent all season doing. (Last year for instance, Rush, Enginerds and us helped a small team whose mentor had been in a car crash. They came to the competition with the kit bot barely functioning. We managed to put a few small pieces that let them play. Then we ended up picking them for the 2nd seed alliance's 3rd pick because for a team with a non-tech mentor and a team with only 4 kids they had heart. That to me is what cheesecaking was meant to be.

Not gonna talk about the game because I have the same issues with it as everyone else.

[hardcopi]

Oh yeah... get the API working. It makes us all look bad. We can get over 600 robots to work in an event but we can't update the website? (FYI I do API's and stuff like that for a living, it isn't that difficult)

[ASmith1675]

Unfortunately, I have far more negatives than positives this year, which seems to be the general consensus based on the posts here compared to the positive feedback thread.

1. This game was dull. It felt dull immediately after the game was announced, and my opinion did not change much. There were moments of excitement, but they were few and far between. Most of the time there wasn't even much cheering when a qualification match completed because there was no winner. In fact, the only time when there was much of a crowd reaction at all was when something negative happened, which shouldn't be the most interesting part of the game.

2. The area in which alliances had to work was over-crowded and any unplanned or uncontrolled robot motion could end put costing your alliance a lot of points. An alliance should ALWAYS be at a disadvantage if they're playing 2v3, but that was not the case this year, and in many cases it could have been considered a strategic advantage.

3. The Can Races. Possibly the worst part of this game. The cans are the most valuable resource in the game, they are limited in number, and more than half of the cans available to each team can be contested by the opposing alliance. I don't consider myself a strategic mastermind, but I saw can races coming as early as day 2 of design, I have trouble believing the GDC didn't see this coming. Once a certainly level of play was achieved, this was a required element of the game. Most of the matches on Einstein were over within less than 1 second of autonomous play (barring mistakes -- again, rooting for failure?). While it didn't decide every match, it decided the majority.

I feel that these races are even worse than the minibots were in 2011 in that everything comes down to the activation from the FMS. I never saw a clear answer about how robots were enabled, but when the race comes down to 100ths of a second, having something completely out of teams control possibly decide the match is a pretty terrible decision. NOTE: My team did not create a canburgler mechanism (though it was discussed), so this particular comment is not a reaction to a specific event.

4. Litter. Thrown litter was at best annoying, and at worst completely detrimental to watching robots actually perform the game tasks. I saw 0 robots that manipulated litter at all and none that intentionally "cleared" litter to the landfill. (Being the lead scouting mentor I watched nearly every match of both of our regionals). What I did see is litter actively clogging up drivetrains and mechanisms of many robots. Watching a high quality robot fight with a pool noodle as it drives is not inspiring to anyone. Thrown litter was also worth far too many points. That 1 piece of litter was worth the same as a 3 robot motion auto was a joke. (Though this may be more related to auto scoring than anything)

5. Co-op. The co-op bonus this year was not well designed. It felt very weird that the co-op task didn't seem particularly related to the rest of the game. I saw plenty of robots that could score co-op, but never built a normal scoring stack. Additionally a good number of very successful robots couldn't do co-op at all. Just a strange design decision. At least they could have had a way for the yellow totes to be useful in the playoffs.

6. The relative worth of these robots moving forward. These are the worst demo bots since 2009. I doubt we'll ever use this robot after the post season competitions are finished. We already had a demo which we could have used this years robot for, but opted to used 2014 instead. It was a massive hit, to the point where we broke our dog shifter by shooting so much. And because we were unable to get replacement parts quickly, we're using 2013 as a fill in. 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 all made good demo bots to some degree. 2015 will sit on a shelf, because its too big to easily transport, and the tasks it completes are not generally "cool" to demonstrate.

[K-Dawg157]

There were moments of excitement, but they were few and far between. Most of the time there wasn't even much cheering when a qualification match completed because there was no winner. In fact, the only time when there was much of a crowd reaction at all was when something negative happened, which shouldn't be the most interesting part of the game.



I completely agree with this. Everyone was cheering that their alliance made a stack, but the loudest cheering was when an alliance knocked over a stack or made a mistake... Not exactly the best thing to teach to students.

[Conor Ryan]

I didn't like the type of cheesecake at Worlds.
2011 style cheesecake, where robots shared Minibots? Awesome. I can't get enough of that. It didn't reconfigure the robot in the eyes of the community, it was just a neighbor helping a neighbor.

Throwing the robot that students built with mentors and teachers in their community and proudly showed off to sponsors and schools in the name of a last ditch effort to get picked? This is questionable ethics. Would I do it if I was in the situation? Sure, its a survival tactic, and as a mentor my students would be down in the dumps and it would be terrible to say no. Should it be against the rules? Yes. Keep the Build Season Sacred.

I would also like FRC to engage communities like Robot In 3 Days to maybe work out better guidance to better keep an "Innovation Sanctuary" during the build season (ie - Release RI3D material after week 5).


Now this is starting to sound like the Financial World and Regulation. Do financial institutions like making lots of money? Yes. Should we be allowed to do it certain ways? No.

[Hot_Copper_Frog]

Detroit is such a run down city that unfortunately does not have the means to rejuvenate.

Ouch.

I'm really disappointed to see that consistently negative views of Detroit as one of the new homes of the Championship event. I'm also disappointed to see so many people in the FIRST community speaking on stereotypes/perceptions before doing their research.

Detroit is a beautiful city, with a rich history of technological innovation. It is home to the largest concentration of FIRST teams in the world. Our Governor is very, very committed to making FIRST successful and rebuilding the economy of Michigan with a STEM foundation. Detroit is coming back, in a very tangible way.

In case you missed it, here is what's going down in Detroit in the next few years before Championships arrives:


$300,000,000 in road construction projects in the next year
M-1 Lightrail system being constructed downtown to improve public transportation
$650,000,000 project that includes a new Red Wings Stadium in Midtown, near Ford Field and complete renovation of the surrounding 45 city blocks to connect Midtown and Downtown. This renovation includes demolition of most buildings, and the construction of residential, small business, and corporate spaces. An additional 2 mile radius around this area includes plans for repaired roads, sidewalk installation, street-light installation/repair, and landscaping.


I also feel that inclement weather could prevent flights and mess up competition scheduling.

There's not much inclement weather in SE Michigan in late April. Snow is sometimes a vague possibility, but it will in no way be severe enough to impact flights or competition scheduling. The likelihood of a tornado in St. Louis is higher than severe weather in Detroit in late April.

Not to mention, with the mass amounts of people coming into town, how are there going to be enough hotels to facilitate to everyone? I'm not saying this out of paranoia of being in dangerous areas, but in Detroit, the entire west side is slowly becoming a ghost town. Are teams going to have to stay in the abandoned houses or are they going to have to stay 1 hour west in Livonia, Ann Arbor, etc?

Really? Abandoned houses? That's a little unnecessary.

Detroit is not becoming a ghost town. Real estate prices are skyrocketing, population has stabilized and is increasing, and things are looking up. And, for the record, Livonia is not an hour away. It's less than a 30 minute drive straight down I-96 Express.

I get that people have an ingrained picture of Detroit in their minds, but reading through CD over the past few weeks I'm getting frustrated by all the nonsense being spouted about my (and many others') home. Frustrated by FIRST's decision? Fine. But keep in mind that you're talking about a place that a huge chunk of the FIRST community holds near and dear to their hearts.

[E Dawg]

The overarching problem with this game wasn't that it was boring, or that there was no defense, etc. It was that none of the concepts made sense. Why was there no defense in the context of this game? Why were half of my totes contestable? There were very few things that anyone could present a logical explanation for this year, and that is why I am dissatisfied with this game.

[wireties]

I had to work the week of champs in Boston and did not arrive till Friday night. The problems with the remote data feed are just ridiculous. There can be no excuse. If volunteer/s were in charge of this, please reassign them. If FIRST paid a company or persons to implement the remote data feeds, they must be fired. Did I mention it was ridiculous?

I'm willing to do something about it. Ask me and I (with a good team) will fix it. This is not rocket science.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Volunteer food for those of us with dietary restrictions was abysmal.

Here let me make this very simple - if the only option is some lettuce it's not enough. Vegetarians (vegans too) have the exact same dietary requirements as everyone else. Which means we need protein and fat in our diet. Every single night I had to go out and get food because the volunteer food didn't even remotely meet basic dietary needs.

Sorry to harp on this but I cannot eat meat, it makes me physically ill.


There was also the issue of gnats all over the volunteer grazing area.

I'm going to go back to hoping seeing mecanums on einstein was just a hallucination brought on by poor diet for almost a week... /s

[mwmac]

I completely agree with this. Everyone was cheering that their alliance made a stack, but the loudest cheering was when an alliance knocked over a stack or made a mistake... Not exactly the best thing to teach to students.

RIP Schadenfreude Rush...

[Kevin Sevcik]

Ditto to a lot of this thread, especially disliking how the game really forced you to be an everything bot to have a decent chance of success. We're not that team and we do poorly whenever we attempt it. We stuck with specializing in tote stacking and ended up with a bot that could nearly clear the landfill when we were on, but was largely useless to an alliance without a can specialist. Based on the Curie picks, most teams figured 2 mediocre can+tote stackers were a better bet than a can specialist + tote specialist. Convincing the team to avoid the omni-bot trap next year is going to take a bit of doing.

Things I haven't seen mentioned:

It really should have been obvious that herding 256 teams from the Pits into the Dome after alliance pairings was going to take forever unless someone organized it. If they'd pulled teams in order of their elim match play, or just prioritized robots vs. mini-pit crews, they probably could have started division elims a lot sooner than they did. If I recall correctly, Tesla was running something like 45 minutes late because of this.

Crowd control is, of course, a perennial problem. The confusion Saturday morning about opening the doors to the Dome but not opening the doors to the Pits seemed unnecessary. Especially when security tried to tell us we HAD to go to the Dome and couldn't wait for the Pits to open. Plus the lovely chokepoint on the 2nd-level where they only had one set of doors open between the Dome and Pits.

Rules enforcement. If you're going to make a rule, you need to enforce it:
Transportation Config was pointless because, to my knowledge, it was never enforced. I know of tether bots that were transported in two separate pieces because it was easier and deemed safe. Meanwhile we put wear on Anderson connectors to make sure we transported in our inspected transport config.
Since everyone was told on Friday to clear a 5x5 for a crate on Saturday morning, we did so and we greeted with a crate on Saturday morning. Literally no other pit around us bothered to do so and had their entire pit to work in. If we'd known this was optional, we wouldn't have bothered doubly inconveniencing ourselves. As it was, we insisted our crate be removed so we could do some work on the robot and pack without it in there like all the other teams around us.

Also better communication. I there were at least 2 different versions of how to get your crate removed on Weds. First we went to the SES desk who told us to just put the empty sticker on it and it'd magically disappear. I believe this was also the version announced over the PA. Our inspector, however, told us we actually had to request SES to remove it. We eventually shoved it into an empty aisle and let FIRST figure out what they wanted to do with it. Since it reappeared to inconvenience us on Saturday, they apparently figured things out.

[Oblarg]

Rules enforcement. If you're going to make a rule, you need to enforce it:
Transportation Config was pointless because, to my knowledge, it was never enforced.

If it had been universally unenforced, that'd have been more acceptable than the uneven enforcement we encountered.

Thankfully this was not a major problem for our team, but at the regionals I attended whether or not the queuing officials checked to see if you were actually in transport configuration was basically impossible to predict. I saw robots go on and off way outside of the size limits multiple times, but also saw teams get called out for having minor protrusions that were not a safety hazard at all.

[Mr. Rick]

I don't think so because averages are dependent on the field and the teams on that field.

Obviously I'm biased, but the two fields didn't have anything to do with each other. The awards never should have been split per "sub-division" anyway.

[Jared Russell]

Of all the negative posts, not one mention of the biggest change this year. A change that affected every team ---- The Roborio and the new control system.

The only thing I disliked was how long the DS<->Robot communications took to get established (I previously have called this "mDNS issues", but Greg McKaskle later clarified that the issue is more complicated than that).

In every other way, I thought the RoboRIO was an improvement over the cRIO.

[Mr. Rick]

The Higest Rookie Seed Award for Carver-Curie went to Team 5442 which was ranked 16th on Carver with an average qual score of 142.90. The higest rookie seed on Curie Team 5407 was ranked 17th with an average qual score of 143.00 which was higher than the winner's. When they combined the awards for two different fields, they did not think it through. The award should have gone to the rookie team with the higher average.

Thanks MsKutz! I'm obviously biased, but I completely agree :-)

It would have just been better to make it 8 divisions rather than cobble together fields and make is pseudo 4.

It was great talking to you and we're looking forward seeing you again in future events!

[Oblarg]

The only thing I disliked was how long the DS<->Robot communications took to get established (I previously have called this "mDNS issues", but Greg McKaskle later clarified that the issue is more complicated than that).

I'll add one more minor quibble in that the signal cables, when plugged into the RoboRio, seemed mechanically less-secure than they ought to have been, though this is fixable by simply dabbing some hot glue on the connector once it's plugged in (thanks to team 1678 for showing us this trick at championships last year).

[Andrew Y.]

There was a bottle neck getting into the Dome for normal matches. IF you were running late, you had to pass a bunch of people in really narrow lane.

The line to get into the Dome for eliminations was awful. We stood in line to get in basically at the practice fields.


It is also frustrating when you are showing a sponsor around and the event staff tell them they are not allowed on the field area even though there is a sign right behind them that says they are allowed.

[bigbeezy]

The awards never should have been split per "sub-division" anyway.

And then they would have needed twice as many judges...

Maybe Highest Rookie Seed could have gone to each division (or sub-division).

[Kevin Sevcik]

I'm putting my annoyance at seat saving into a separate post to save people the trouble when replying.

Seat saving was a problem. I know it's theoretically not allowed, but having to explain that to the ignorant is extremely trying when you're already tired from 2 days of competition and just want somewhere to sit while your match comes up. One of my NEMOs had to shame a team that should really know better into letting a physically disabled student take a seat in a row they were "saving". I personally decided I'd rather sit somewhere else than argue with a scout that needed two nice seats at the end of a row for filing boxes. Because he had to FILE in those boxes. Thank goodness I wasn't escorting any VIPs or sponsors or I'd have to explain why filing boxes needed a better view of the field than themselves.

To the suggestions that we smaller teams should just suck it up and get in there and save seats like the big boys:

No.

We bring a skeleton crew to Champs and travel regionals. We do not have people to spare to plop in the stands indefinitely just so we don't have to argue with you when the pit crew finally gets a break to watch a match or two. Nor do I feel like stooping to your level of ignoring the rules and trying to intimidate teams into accepting it.

And please don't tell me that this is an isolated problem stemming from parents/mentors/tagalongs that just don't know better. If they don't know they're being jerks, it's not my job to educate them at the competition; it's your job to educate them beforehand. Believe me, its for the best that you do so, because I and some of my mentors are going to be much less polite about it than you will be.

This is not to say I don't appreciate the problems faced by large teams attending events. You have far more people bringing far more stuff than you could ever hope to stash in your pits between matches. Thus everyone parks with all their stuff in the stands. And then there's a load of stuff spread out in the stands that you really don't want strangers moving about and sitting amongst for completely understandable reasons. These are entirely legitimate concerns. It's just that you always seem to park yourselves and your stuff in the best seating available, and then we have to wonder why the pom-poms and backpacks (and filing boxes) always seem to get the best seats at the event.

It seems like we've been arguing this issue for over a decade now, and clearly the community is no closer to a solution. The team viewing area certainly helps, but it doesn't do much to provide argument-free seating for casual observers or people who want to catch a match or two that doesn't involve their team. I think more action on the FRC side of things is the only way things will get better.

My proposed solution would be adding an additional "No Saved Seats Period" seating zone around the current match team viewing area. Preferably with large-print easy to read signs and an usher or two to cut down on arguments. Teams would be welcome to reserve space outside of this zone as a home base, but seat saving in the zone would be banned or strictly curtailed to only support scouting teams (1-2 seats per person, up to 4 saved seats per team). This would obviously take some tweaking, but I think it'd work a bit better than the jungle rules that currently seem to reign in the stands.

[Andrew Schreiber]

And then they would have needed twice as many judges...

Maybe Highest Rookie Seed could have gone to each division (or sub-division).

No, they wouldn't have. The number of judges scales based on number of teams interviewed (at the event) not with the number of awards given out.

In short, we had enough judges there to give out awards per field.

[waialua359]

Champs never ever ever ever ever finishes on time.:confused:
We've learned over the years, and proven once again, that we need to plan things 2-3 hours after the proposed schedule of events end on Saturday.

Better communication in general needs to be made DURING the Championship.
Lots of planning and emails go out to teams prior to the event. When major changes occur, such as the annoucement of the Chairman's Award, there should be email blasts after every day of the event of such changes/suggestions/revisions.

[Kevin Sevcik]

The only thing I disliked was how long the DS<->Robot communications took to get established (I previously have called this "mDNS issues", but Greg McKaskle later clarified that the issue is more complicated than that).

In every other way, I thought the RoboRIO was an improvement over the cRIO.
I'll add one more minor quibble in that the signal cables, when plugged into the RoboRio, seemed mechanically less-secure than they ought to have been, though this is fixable by simply dabbing some hot glue on the connector once it's plugged in (thanks to team 1678 for showing us this trick at championships last year).Since I've seen a handful of roboRIO replies here, I've spawned a separate thread (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1477045) to collect them so they don't get lost in the mass of grumping about the game/competition.

[cgmv123]

No, they wouldn't have. The number of judges scales based on number of teams interviewed (at the event) not with the number of awards given out.

In short, we had enough judges there to give out awards per field.

The number of awards given out is related to the the number of teams interviewed and the deliberation time required. Twice the awards means twice the deliberation time, which either means longer deliberation periods or more judges.

[Andrew Schreiber]

The number of awards given out is related to the the number of teams interviewed and the deliberation time required. Twice the awards means twice the deliberation time, which either means longer deliberation periods or more judges.

Just trust me on this one. There were enough of us to do awards for each field.

And deliberation time is roughly inversely correlated to the percentage of teams in the pool who will get awards. If we are able to give ~40% of teams an award it's much easier than ~10%.

- S

[kgargiulo]

RIP Schadenfreude Rush...

Well done working schadenfreude into a CD post.

[ThePancakeMan]

The only issue I had a real issue dealing with, was with the paper airplanes and litter everywhere. I understand that it is fun to throw them and all but, I feel it was a little bit excessive. I witnessed a lot of people get hit in the face. With everyone focusing on the competition it becomes a little difficult to notice the paper airplane flying at you. Not to mention that it is just more trash wont be cleaned up by the people that threw them. Again, I understand that it is a petty thing and that it is all just meant to be fun. However it did start to get very annoying.

[Kate Muller]

Our team had an amazing year. It is the first time since our rookie year that we qualified for Champs.

I love the district model except our district regional ended at 7 pm on April 18th. That gave us 10 days to plan a trip to ST Louis. We didn't have any mentors on the team that had ever planned a trip to Champs before so it was a painful learning curve.

The hotel reservation and badge registration site was a nightmare. I kept getting emails form First telling me I had to assign rooms or they would drop our block and we hadn't had our qualifying regional yet. Phone calls resulted in confusing and contradictory information.

Find a bus would have been impossible if FIRST hadn't had a bunch reserved.
There were problems with the bus company and I hope FIRST can arrange for better service next time.

I know FIRST is trying to go paperless for many things but that didn't work for us. The app for conference schedule wouldn't download on my phone. Also all the apps requesting access to my contacts and photos was a no go for most of my team.

The lack of maps with location labels was painful. The blue sign labeled innovation faire in the hallway on the second floor of the conference was completely useless and sent many a person on a wild goose chase.

Last minutes email updates are not very useful to a first time attending team. Having a printed copies posted on a wall in the pits would have been very helpful.

The hour + long lines to buy merchandise were a fail. I didn't buy any FIRST souvenirs because I didn't have hours to spend waiting in line. Not labeling the small satellite locations with shirt size limitations was another fail. I had a mentor wait in line for 45 minutes to find out the shirts at that location were all mediums.

I would love to see higher quality food and more options for people with dietary restrictions. Having inconsistent information on being able to bring food into the venue didn't help our team members with severe food allergies.

[ratdude747]

Oh yeah... get the API working. It makes us all look bad. We can get over 600 robots to work in an event but we can't update the website? (FYI I do API's and stuff like that for a living, it isn't that difficult)

(Speaking as one of the scorekeepers on Hopper)

This was due to internet connection speed issues between the scorpion (field computer case) and NASA (where our internet and backups come through), not an API problem. With sync enabled it would take too long for scores to be committed to the database and backed up (what happens between the head ref giving a thumbs up and the score being posted to the audience screen). It was slow without the syncing issue (supposedly due to FMS changes to allow for two Einstein fields)... but with sync enabled it was so bad that it would time out half the time.

Sorry about that... We at least (AFAIK) updated things over lunch break and after the last match of the day...

[hardcopi]

There was definitely something not right with it. I assumed since MiCMP used the same system (and had issues at the beginning) that they were testing it out for use on Einstein.

I just hope they get it fixed for next year. I was like a junkie for the rankings. :)

[nrgy_blast]

0) Stop burning so much time getting Einstein set up.

1) Stop throwing airplanes when matches are going on. It's one thing to waste time when EVERYONE is bored (waiting for something.... anything to happen before Einstein), but there's no reason to do this while a match is going on or between matches. Especially during qualification days.

2) Requiring badges for EVERYONE attending, in the name of security? What a joke.

3) I like the scorekeeping as averaging instead of W-L-T, though only in qualificiations (even more qual matches would be good, too). Go back to double-elimination for the bracked.

4) Seriously, unless someone literally just got up for a bio-break and will be back in 3 minutes, there is no seat saving. Deal with it. As a side note, the seats along the back of the lower stands (direct access, no stairs required) are for people with physical difficulties. If you could walk 1/2 a mile to get to the stands, DON'T sit in that row of seats!

5) I'm not here for a concert or to see celebrities. I'm here for a robotics competition. Please remember this in the future.

[Hot_Copper_Frog]

5) I'm not here for a concert or to see celebrities. I'm here for a robotics competition. Please remember this in the future.

You may not be, but you have to understand that in the spirit of broadening the audience of FIRST and "ramping up" the cool factor of the Championship event, it's not a bad idea. While it wasn't executed in the best way possible, I can see the vision that FIRST is aiming for, and I think it has merit.

Many people attend championships for reasons other than robots. The high level of energy. The intense and grand atmosphere. The feeling that you are a part of something greater than yourself. Meeting people from all over the world. And yes, seeing and possibly meeting some big name individuals.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with that. Please remember this in the future.

[alecmuller]

Championship in particular and FIRST as a whole could really benefit from more effective communication.

This event could have been far less confusing, especially for teams like mine that haven't been in 4+ years.

1. Mark acceptable load-in locations on the map shared beforehand. Even the FRC-uniformed volunteers I spoke with didn't know what was allowed. They told me several times that "they would prefer" that we load in through the doors in the back of the building even though 30+ teams (including mine) had already dropped their gear along 7th and Convention Plaza. Security eventually did let those teams in.

2. Simulcast the Opening Ceremonies, or make it viewable from all 8 sections of the stands, or at least tell people they need to move if they want to watch. It's bad enough to make 10,000 people shuffle a quarter of a mile from one side of the stadium to the other to participate. It's worse when they don't bother to announce it to those people.

3. After alliance selections, tell teams they need to set up a new pit in center field. The 15'x15' pits make perfect sense, but I'd never heard of them until one of our alliance partners came and asked to coordinate which tools we took out there. They told me it was buried in some email FIRST had sent out a couple of days ago, but I didn't see it and still can't find it. This is definitely worth announcing to teams before they need to do it.

4. Train venue security so they know who they're supposed to let in. I saw scores of people with badges get turned away from entrances close to the team parking lots that had "Team Entrance" signs out front, forcing them to walk an extra 1/2 mile to get in through the main entrance and then loop back to the dome.

5. Remove unnecessary permissions from the FIRST Championship App. I don't know what the app offers (because I declined to sign over EVERYTHING on my phone, and I haven't found a decent description of it) but all I want are schedule-changes and other announcements. Apps that require everything a stalker could want do not inspire confidence that they use good security practices and will safeguard the data I share with them. Alternatively, they could explain what each of the permissions are needed for and offer reduced-function apps that need fewer permissions.

6. This is a general FIRST comment and not Championship-specific, but Please, please, please let me help you test the UI for your website. Everyone I've ever talked to about your website has had a great deal of trouble navigating it, and it's an embarrassment that I have to warn people about it when they decide to join after hearing all the awesome things I tell them about FIRST. Our Dean's List nominee almost got disqualified because her family got stuck trying to navigate all the way through STIMS.

I love that FIRST's goal is to change the culture to be more inspired by and appreciative of technology. Communication is a huge element in mobilizing that change, and there's a great deal of low-hanging fruit that FIRST can work on to improve it and speed up growth.

[Alan Anderson]

4. Train venue security so they know who they're supposed to let in. I saw scores of people with badges get turned away from entrances close to the team parking lots that had "Team Entrance" signs out front, forcing them to walk an extra 1/2 mile to get in through the main entrance and then loop back to the dome.

Hear, hear.

Two mornings in a row, I got stopped and yelled at by people who apparently thought they were supposed to keep everybody out of the building until the pits opened. The orange VOLUNTEER strip on my badge did not seem to mean anything to them. It took quite a lot of explanation on my part, and some nodding from other nearby gatekeepers, before they would let me through.

[PurpleNinja88]

please, I am begging you FIRST with all my heart, please have a professional company do the stream and the audio. For those of you that were not watching the stream you have no idea what it was like.


Awards for so grainy and washed out you didn't even know who was talking
we were lucky if we got audio at some parts
During Einstein, we saw more of the human players and drivers than the actual robots
the cameras kept cutting back and forth between individual robots and missing the action so when it was over your like "huh, when did that happen"
please for the love of "bot" just show us a full field view that's what the people want
You were lucky if you got a whole match without it freezing.

I could continue in with this list but you get the point. Even if you didn't get pros to do the audio and video at least get the kids from PNW that were doing it. Shout out to the PNW A/V crew you guys were the best. High quality streams and never missed the action.

I second what you said completely. Establishing a standard for AV quality at worlds is a MUST to encourage growth and recognition of the sport. You don't see grainy promo photos on the banners that drape the entrance to the dome nor do you have to struggle to hear Dean speak through an sporadic microphone. The AV quality online should be the same offered to those at the event in person.

The same can be said for districts and regional events. Mentoring the students in pre-scouting worlds this year the number one complaint was low quality video or no video footage at all of the teams from the smaller regional events.

Encouraging these lower level events to try and achieve quality video as a goal would be great. Talking with the AV crew from PNW several times, I know it is a lot of work and acquiring the quality equipment they have is not necessarily cheap either. But if FIRST could help support teams in finding the funding, resources, and volunteers to pull it off would be a good start.

I know at the school we mentor some of the teachers that support the team will stream our teams events live during class sometimes. Having quality video of matches makes FRC look truly awe inspiring when presented to a novice of FRC. It makes it easy to show your school, sponsors, and parents what we are all about. Not to mention recruiting mentors or volunteers.

In short...yes it is not easy or cheap, but putting the resources out there for teams to improve it would be a major step in the right direction for ease of scouting and most importantly, promotion of FRC teams.

[Kevin Leonard]

Hear, hear.

Two mornings in a row, I got stopped and yelled at by people who apparently thought they were supposed to keep everybody out of the building until the pits opened. The orange VOLUNTEER strip on my badge did not seem to mean anything to them. It took quite a lot of explanation on my part, and some nodding from other nearby gatekeepers, before they would let me through.

During alliance selections on Carson, there was an individual keeping the team seating area empty of teams not in matches who didn't understand that there were no matches until 9:30, and we needed to be closer to the field to help 5254 whiteboard a pick to their field representative.

To his credit, I'm sure people had been giving him a hard time all weekend and he held his ground, but he didn't understand the way the event was to be run. The front set of team seating rows (which was fantastic to have when there were matches, by the way) stayed empty throughout alliance selections, and we did manage to find a few seats for a set of picklisting scouts and a whiteboard, but it was incredibly frustrating for not just 20 and 5254, but also at least a dozen other people trying to sit there for alliance selections.

[Eugene Fang]

(Speaking as one of the scorekeepers on Hopper)

This was due to internet connection speed issues between the scorpion (field computer case) and NASA (where our internet and backups come through), not an API problem. With sync enabled it would take too long for scores to be committed to the database and backed up (what happens between the head ref giving a thumbs up and the score being posted to the audience screen). It was slow without the syncing issue (supposedly due to FMS changes to allow for two Einstein fields)... but with sync enabled it was so bad that it would time out half the time.

Sorry about that... We at least (AFAIK) updated things over lunch break and after the last match of the day...

From what I gather, sending scores to FIRST's servers required a full database upload from FMS, which was slow due to the limited bandwidth. A match score should only be a few KB. The problem seems to be that FIRST hacked the API to use the data from the full database dump instead of implementing a lower overhead solution.

[tam1957]

I skimmed 9 pages of responses and did not see my favorite negative mentioned: the sideline reporter at Einstein. Since she knew nothing about the game, every question was the same and her reaction to every response was "awesome!". C'mon First, if you really need an Erin Andrews sideline chick, at least require her to do her homework.

For all the complaints in the previous 9 pages, lighten up - it was a great time.

[GreyingJay]

I skimmed 9 pages of responses and did not see my favorite negative mentioned: the sideline reporter at Einstein. Since she knew nothing about the game, every question was the same and her reaction to every response was "awesome!". C'mon First, if you really need an Erin Andrews sideline chick, at least require her to do her homework.


YES!

I especially liked how in the very first interview she started off with "I'm here with... uh... I don't even know your team number" and she grabbed the interviewee's name badge to check.

And asking 1114 how they were doing immediately after they had been eliminated, seemed insensitive... except everyone already had a sense that she had not been versed at all in the game. The freshman student sitting beside me picked up on this right away and couldn't take her seriously after that.

I liked that they brought in Team 1448 to present the FRC Rhapsody, too bad it was so obvious they were lip syncing to the video. Would have been fun (though difficult, I know) if they could have performed it live.

[Madison]

I skimmed 9 pages of responses and did not see my favorite negative mentioned: the sideline reporter at Einstein. Since she knew nothing about the game, every question was the same and her reaction to every response was "awesome!". C'mon First, if you really need an Erin Andrews sideline chick, at least require her to do her homework.

For all the complaints in the previous 9 pages, lighten up - it was a great time.

The subtle misogyny here is my favorite part.

[GreyingJay]

The subtle misogyny here is my favorite part.

For a counter-example to the on-field interviewer at Einstein, I call attention to this video of the 2014 FIRST In Michigan video that someone linked to in one of the other threads as an example of excellent presentation and camera work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYh_F0eDaxU

[David Lame]

From what I gather, sending scores to FIRST's servers required a full database upload from FMS, which was slow due to the limited bandwidth. A match score should only be a few KB. The problem seems to be that FIRST hacked the API to use the data from the full database dump instead of implementing a lower overhead solution.

There's a much bigger problem.

So, the technical solution failed, and someone decided that there was no need to find a backup solution. Those of us who wanted to keep track of our favorite teams were stuck.

Find a whiteboard and a webcam if you have to, but get the scores out. This event is big enough to attract a TV audience (21st century variety). I was just amazed that First didn't think enough of the fans to make sure that the scores were updated.

TBA got it,(thanks again) but didn't have the resources available to do 100% of the areas. Being from the Detroit area, I was especially interested in Hopper, and that was one of the fields they weren't getting updates on most of the time.

[rkgoyankees]

Others have said it, but I wish the endgame would return. I thought that it made matches more exciting by allowing teams to turn the tide towards the end of a match. I thought that 2013's was balanced well. It allowed for alliances to make a comeback if they were behind but it wasn't an insta-win at higher levels.

[Kevin Sevcik]

For a counter-example to the on-field interviewer at Einstein, I call attention to this video of the 2014 FIRST In Michigan video that someone linked to in one of the other threads as an example of excellent presentation and camera work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYh_F0eDaxUNot sure why you think this counters the misogyny in the original post. That would be something more on the lines of:
Derogatory words like "chick" aren't necessary to criticize poor reporting and suggest you have a poor view of women in technical roles like this. Perhaps you meant something less sexist like "sideline reporter" instead of "Erin Andrews sideline chick".

[GreyingJay]

Not sure why you think this counters the misogyny in the original post. That would be something more on the lines of:
Derogatory words like "chick" aren't necessary to criticize poor reporting and suggest you have a poor view of women in technical roles like this. Perhaps you meant something less sexist like "sideline reporter" instead of "Erin Andrews sideline chick".

Ah, I was thinking more along the lines of assuming that women sports interviewers don't/can't know what they are talking about, not specifically the wording in the post you quoted.

(Though, very possibly, shame on me for not picking up on the derogatory "chick" phrasing.)

[EricAnderson191]

Without W-L-T or any form of (non-canburglar, non-noodle throwing) defense, outgunned teams have nothing to cheer for but for their competitors to mess up. I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit. I do not blame them (and take the cheering as a gesture of respect for our robot), but it was a little hard to swallow and to explain to our students. I wish the incentives did not align this way.



Many people had 254 making it to the finals and I was shocked to hear that the team did not make it out of their division. I checked in with your team later in the day and they said that could go wrong did. This has to be especially galling after so many matches played at a high level.

Perhaps something to add to planning and practice for a similar game is to predict what happens when disaster strikes and how to recover from it.

Eric

[Andrew Y.]

I second what you said completely. Establishing a standard for AV quality at worlds is a MUST to encourage growth and recognition of the sport. You don't see grainy promo photos on the banners that drape the entrance to the dome nor do you have to struggle to hear Dean speak through an sporadic microphone. The AV quality online should be the same offered to those at the event in person.

The same can be said for districts and regional events. Mentoring the students in pre-scouting worlds this year the number one complaint was low quality video or no video footage at all of the teams from the smaller regional events.

Encouraging these lower level events to try and achieve quality video as a goal would be great. Talking with the AV crew from PNW several times, I know it is a lot of work and acquiring the quality equipment they have is not necessarily cheap either. But if FIRST could help support teams in finding the funding, resources, and volunteers to pull it off would be a good start.

I know at the school we mentor some of the teachers that support the team will stream our teams events live during class sometimes. Having quality video of matches makes FRC look truly awe inspiring when presented to a novice of FRC. It makes it easy to show your school, sponsors, and parents what we are all about. Not to mention recruiting mentors or volunteers.

In short...yes it is not easy or cheap, but putting the resources out there for teams to improve it would be a major step in the right direction for ease of scouting and most importantly, promotion of FRC teams.

but guys...it's not about the robots. it is about the students....

[EricAnderson191]

The tournament structure, specifically average scores with no forgiveness for any mistakes, was atrocious. It's robotics - things go wrong. Consistency should be important, but if the first second of the first match can make your entire elimination run completely worthless, something needs to change. I never want to see the morale of a team so quickly killed again. I never want to have to make students play a match that they know is utterly pointless again. This must not be the new norm.


I disagree a bit here. A team at champs played at least 10-12 matches before getting to St Louis plus another 10 matches in their division. It is reasonable to think that most of the bugs would have been worked out. Knocking over stacks in elimination rounds is something that teams should have figured out how to prevent during practice sessions. The fact that some good teams who had been posting 200+ points in qualifications only to score 180 or less in elims points to plain old bad luck and issues with having drivers handle the stress of the competition.

At the same time, a bad match in Recycle Rush is pretty devastating. The X-Cats had a match at Finger Lakes where to get the average up our alliance would have needed a 300+ game while the other alliance needed to score, say, 50 points. Both scenarios were possible but not very likely.

[EricAnderson191]

I worked as a safety glasses attendant and had to deal with problems on Wednesday and Thursday.

On Wednesday before 5pm, pit access was supposed to be limited to 5 team members. There was no way to enforce this so most teams came through with everybody. This was a safety problem due to the large amounts of equipment being moved into the pits. Some monitors tried to enforce the 5 person rule which only annoyed people and slowed down the lines.

So for next year, if this rule/procedure is really important, FIRST needs to get buttons, ribbons, etc, to the load-in crew so convention center staff and FIRST volunteers can help enforce it. I do not care one way or another as I believe the fear of a person being impaled by trusswork or of actually doing the impaling will make people move thoughtfully.

On Thursday, one of the divisions was running late and we were told to shut down pits at 5pm on the nose. Ushers were there to do this and several teams who had legitimate business in the pits were denied. Some adults got nasty with the ushers who then called security. The issue was resolved when a paid FIRST staff member gave the necessary instructions to let people in.

On other notes:
- Men's bathrooms were gross after about 12noon. Leaky toilets, broken soap dispensers, and empty towel rolls ruled the day.
- Convention Center concessions were expensive. If I respect the operator's no outside food rule, then I expect not to have to pay $10 for a hamburger.

Meeting people was great and some the scenes of teams walking around will stay with me for a long time. After all, where else but an FRC even will you see a pig identify someone they know, give a hug, and then pose for a selfie?

Eric

[Andrew Schreiber]

YES!

I especially liked how in the very first interview she started off with "I'm here with... uh... I don't even know your team number" and she grabbed the interviewee's name badge to check.


Have you ever been in front of 30 thousand people? It's kinda scary. I had to announce my Judges at the NEU District (about 1/30th the size) and I was nervous. Heck, I forgot to announce who I was... I'm 26, have been speaking in front of crowds since I was 12. She was much younger.

Sorry, I am always going to defend someone who has the guts to go in front of people live, it's something most of us couldn't do.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Have you ever been in front of 30 thousand people? It's kinda scary. I had to announce my Judges at the NEU District (about 1/30th the size) and I was nervous. Heck, I forgot to announce who I was... I'm 26, have been speaking in front of crowds since I was 12. She was much younger.

Sorry, I am always going to defend someone who has the guts to go in front of people live, it's something most of us couldn't do.I think being handed the mic after winning the Bayou WFFA was my worst adult* public speaking moment. I think I managed to stammer out a thank you to my students. We should probably attach that script to the Mobius Bearing to help out all the new winners.

*Worst ever was speaking as high school valedictorian at our ring ceremony. Towards the end I his a paragraph break and paused and I swear everyone held their breath hoping I was done. And then I kept going. I hope to never lose an audience that thoroughly again.

[JesseK]

My only unique negative this season stemmed from the ability to make a robot taller than our trailer and taller than our crates. It causes us many hours of headache to have to separate the vertical towers in such a way that they would work smoothly with the lift when reassembled. Then there's the whole issue about short people being unable to work on the upper part of the robot. Cap the starting height at 60" so we won't have the temptation to put ourselves through that again ;)

Without W-L-T or any form of (non-canburglar, non-noodle throwing) defense, outgunned teams have nothing to cheer for but for their competitors to mess up. I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit. I do not blame them (and take the cheering as a gesture of respect for our robot), but it was a little hard to swallow and to explain to our students. I wish the incentives did not align this way.
...
Once again, FIRST totally dropped the ball on making sure people can follow events from home. The Championship streams were awful, and scores and rankings weren't event updating through most of the weekend. It is 2015. Why do PNW, FiM, dozens of regionals, or Chezy Champs have better streams than the FIRST Championship?


Neither alliance had a good QF-8. As I pulled our robot off the field it was utterly nauseating to hear it - it was so loud and seemed to be coming from most of the teams in the stands. It was so emphatic, as if the crowd felt they had actually done something to topple the Poofs. My team will attest to the fact that I'm not an externally-emotional guy - but that moment was gut-wrenching.

Agree, 100% and more about the webcasts. Apparently each event has an A/V company who's in charge, and while my non-profit was willing to fork over a few $hundred for a high-res live h264 encoder, the DC Regional venue's A/V team refused to give us anything but the typical RCA output (even though HDMI was available...).

[Conor Ryan]

Agree, 100% and more about the webcasts. Apparently each event has an A/V company who's in charge, and while my non-profit was willing to fork over a few $hundred for a high-res live h264 encoder, the DC Regional venue's A/V team refused to give us anything but the typical RCA output (even though HDMI was available...).

There is nothing in the District/Regional Planning Guide about webcasts, maybe if there was we could get a little more standardization to allow for teams to host on behalf of the events. http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/regional-planning-committee

The organizational expenses on FRC is ~$36 million for 2014 (http://www.usfirst.org/sites/default/files/uploadedFiles/Who/Annual_Report-Financials/FIRST_FY2014_%20Audited_Financials.pdf), and it is difficult to make it loud when we can't tell Grandma to tune in easily (but at least she can go to one of two championships if she makes it!). I'm really hoping we can get more transparency into the financials so we can get a good estimate on what the organization spent on the concerts/FIRST Finale at CMP. I think most of the organization would rather have a substantially better webcast and production over those add on experiences.

[DarthCoder]

I'd like to see it go back to winning instead of average score, and I'd like to see defense return. We had so much fun playing a defensive robot the year before, but we were kind of disappointed that defensive play was gone in Recycle Rush. When defense is an option it serves to even the playing field a bit, because the big high scoring juggernaut teams can still be taken down by a really good defensive performance. I also think that the way autonomous was scored this year wasn't very fun either. We got our can in the auto zone 90% of the time, but we only got auto points for it twice because other teams just sat there and everyone had to get inside the auto zone for any points to count.

[MagiChau]

There is nothing in the District/Regional Planning Guide about webcasts, maybe if there was we could get a little more standardization to allow for teams to host on behalf of the events. http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/regional-planning-committee

The organizational expenses on FRC is ~$36 million for 2014 (http://www.usfirst.org/sites/default/files/uploadedFiles/Who/Annual_Report-Financials/FIRST_FY2014_%20Audited_Financials.pdf), and it is difficult to make it loud when we can't tell Grandma to tune in easily (but at least she can go to one of two championships if she makes it!). I'm really hoping we can get more transparency into the financials so we can get a good estimate on what the organization spent on the concerts/FIRST Finale at CMP. I think most of the organization would rather have a substantially better webcast and production over those add on experiences.

This year FiM completely took over the role of providing broadcasts for Michigan competitions. Every competition I watched was provided in HD through a Twitch stream.

I think all of the FIRST planning committees need to recognize HD webcasts are the bare minimum for every event. Having teams provide the webcasts is only an ad-hoc fix since they may not be able to cover every event or become unable to provide coverage in future years.

The rest of the world needs to follows Michigan's footsteps.

[Carolyn_Grace]

I'm going to be pretty blunt here:

My personal opinion is that Show Ready is out of touch with what creates an efficient production for FIRST. All Show Ready, A/V, or any production staff should always be physically paired with a knowledgeable FIRST person.

[Andrew Schreiber]

I'm going to be pretty blunt here:

My personal opinion is that Show Ready is out of touch with what creates an efficient production for FIRST. All Show Ready, A/V, or any production staff should always be physically paired with a knowledgeable FIRST person.

I'd be cautious to make this claim without knowing how much of the decision making process is HQ/Planning Committee and how much is SRE.

[Taylor]

I understand that in real-life engineering, mistakes can be fatal - catastrophic even. I understand that FRC is made to mimic real-life engineering - too tough a task, not enough time to do it, not enough money to fund it - the things Dr. Flowers says every year.
I also understand that FRC is at least partially a high school event. I liked using the Qualification Average as a way to rank the teams - it seemed much more effective than the traditional WLT method. And good teams with bad matches could still perform in eliminations through alliance selections.
But the challenge of overcoming a bad match in eliminations was, in many ways, impossibly hard. If a team got a DQ - even if it was due to miscommunication with event staff - it was a death sentence for the entire alliance.

[Carolyn_Grace]

I'd be cautious to make this claim without knowing how much of the decision making process is HQ/Planning Committee and how much is SRE.

I was cautious. I included the phrase, "In my opinion" for a reason. I understand that this is strictly a personal opinion, and one that many others may disagree with. That's okay.

Regardless, I stand by my statement that all Show Ready, A/V, or production crew need to be paired with a knowledgeable robotics person.

Many district events and state championship events are managed more efficiently and have better production value than some Show Ready managed robotics events. (FiM State Championship, for example...)

Why is this?

[PayneTrain]

Agree, 100% and more about the webcasts. Apparently each event has an A/V company who's in charge, and while my non-profit was willing to fork over a few $hundred for a high-res live h264 encoder, the DC Regional venue's A/V team refused to give us anything but the typical RCA output (even though HDMI was available...).

Yeah, we hit this snag last year and this year we didn't even bother in Virginia. 2363 ended up archiving the matches and I think they did it by attaching a camera to a pole at the top of the stands. It's pretty silly.

[Koko Ed]

I was cautious. I included the phrase, "In my opinion" for a reason. I understand that this is strictly a personal opinion, and one that many others may disagree with. That's okay.

Regardless, I stand by my statement that all Show Ready, A/V, or production crew need to be paired with a knowledgeable robotics person.

Many district events and state championship events are managed more efficiently and have better production value than some Show Ready managed robotics events. (FiM State Championship, for example...)

Why is this?
I actually think Show Ready adds a nice polish to the events. They just bit off more than they could chew this time around. When things start to go south some things needed to be cut loose for the sake of the show going on.
Now that they know what they are up against I suspect they will do a much better job next year.

[Jay O'Donnell]

I was cautious. I included the phrase, "In my opinion" for a reason. I understand that this is strictly a personal opinion, and one that many others may disagree with. That's okay.

Regardless, I stand by my statement that all Show Ready, A/V, or production crew need to be paired with a knowledgeable robotics person.

Many district events and state championship events are managed more efficiently and have better production value than some Show Ready managed robotics events. (FiM State Championship, for example...)

Why is this?

One of the people in charge of Show Ready Events happens to be from our town, sponsors us, and knows a great deal about the program. Try putting on an event for 40,000 people, it's not easy.

[Carolyn_Grace]

One of the people in charge of Show Ready Events happens to be from our town, sponsors us, and knows a great deal about the program. Try putting on an event for 40,000 people, it's not easy.

It's definitely not. I'm not proposing getting rid of Show Ready. Perhaps I need to reword my statement in order for people to understand it better:

Managing an event for over 40,000 people is extremely difficult on every level. In order to make it more efficient, every important role should be doubled up to include a production person and a knowledgeable robotics person. This would help Show Ready create a more polished event that ensures a more positive team experience.

[Andrew Schreiber]

One of the people in charge of Show Ready Events happens to be from our town, sponsors us, and knows a great deal about the program. Try putting on an event for 40,000 people, it's not easy.

Jay, I think you happened on exactly the reason I disagreed so strongly to the wording of the statement. Sandy is a wonderful lady and a great supporter of FIRST. I have no doubt she would do anything possible to make an event go off as smoothly as possible.

[Carolyn_Grace]

Jay, I think you happened on exactly the reason I disagreed so strongly to the wording of the statement. Sandy is a wonderful lady and a great supporter of FIRST. I have no doubt she would do anything possible to make an event go off as smoothly as possible.

Every single Show Ready person I have met is a wonderful individual and great supporter of the program. They clearly love their jobs and the opportunity they have. I greatly enjoy talking to them, and even hanging out with them post-event.

None of that means that the end result, especially at the World Championship, is exempt from scrutiny.

As I said before: why is it that many events can be managed without Show Ready and have a better production overall? What are they doing to have success?

This thread is about lessons learned from the negative side. I do not believe the Show Ready experience at Champs was as great as it should have been this year. I believe something needs to be adapted in order to improve the current system that they use. I offered a possible solution.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Every single Show Ready person I have met is a wonderful individual and great supporter of the program. They clearly love their jobs and the opportunity they have. I greatly enjoy talking to them, and even hanging out with them post-event.

None of that means that the end result, especially at the World Championship, is exempt from scrutiny.

As I said before: why is it that many events can be managed without Show Ready and have a better production overall? What are they doing to have success?

This thread is about lessons learned from the negative side. I do not believe the Show Ready experience at Champs was as great as it should have been this year. I believe something needs to be adapted in order to improve the current system that they use. I offered a possible solution.

I'd be curious which portions you felt were issues caused by SRE. The two big issues I witnessed were the various delays of things starting (Opening Ceremonies and Einstein, I skipped out for Closing because I needed to eat something that provided nutritional value to me) and the mess that was divisional finalist/winner medals.

In the second case, the SRE guy on Hopper was simply understaffed. He knew exactly what needed to happen but had nobody to help facilitate that. (It's how I ended up doing crowd control wearing a 125 shirt, so if you were on Hopper and got yelled at by some random person from 125, sorry. Was just trying to follow the instructions he'd given me, it was chaos) This wasn't a function of not understanding what it took to run an FRC event, it was just a lack of people. I'd chalk it up to growing pains.

The delays, idk what caused them.

Admittedly, I wasn't in the dome all that much due to my job having me over in the pits most of the time. So, I'm actually curious.

[Carolyn_Grace]

I'd be curious which portions you felt were issues caused by SRE. The two big issues I witnessed were the various delays of things starting (Opening Ceremonies and Einstein, I skipped out for Closing because I needed to eat something that provided nutritional value to me) and the mess that was divisional finalist/winner medals.

The delays, idk what caused them.



My understanding is that SRE is in charge of scripting all of those ceremonies and handling the majority of the production. That's what they're paid to do and manage.

[mklinker]

I'd be curious which portions you felt were issues caused by SRE. The two big issues I witnessed were the various delays of things starting (Opening Ceremonies and Einstein, I skipped out for Closing because I needed to eat something that provided nutritional value to me) and the mess that was divisional finalist/winner medals.

The delays, idk what caused them.

Carolyn was on the field before, during, and after the transition from Telsa to Einstein as was I. I can't tell you who was in charge (FIRST, Show Ready, or both) but that transition was a train wreck! The transition was poorly planned an executed with a number of different people in charge and little to no communication. There is very clearly room for improvement.

[Andrew Schreiber]

My understanding is that SRE is in charge of scripting all of those ceremonies and handling the majority of the production. That's what they're paid to do and manage.

I can tell you that, at the District level, that is mostly correct. Except for the scripts proceeding the judge's scripts (The "blah blah blah award celebrates blah blah blah"), those are provided by HQ to the Judge Advisor. The JA then fills in the scripts the judges write about the winners. These are then supposed to be proofed by the JA and the production company. The slides are also put together either by the JA or the production company. To my knowledge, these templates are all provided by HQ.

The awards are put together by awards assistants who are also the folks who handle making sure they go to the judges. (Nit pick, the Awards Assistant during opening ceremonies was wearing khakis and it was incredibly distracting, that's a black shirt black pants job at that event)

Otherwise, you're right, the production company is generally responsible for making sure the AV is functional, the cameras are pointed right, and the event goes off on time. I'd be interested in finding out what caused the delays, mostly on Einstein.


(Edit: Carolyn, I'm pretty confident you know all of this, I mostly typed it up for folks who haven't been on the other side of the event. There's a ton that has to come together to make a ceremony go off. And there ARE quite a few different groups that each have distinct leadership.)

[DavidGitz]

The number of awards given out is related to the the number of teams interviewed and the deliberation time required. Twice the awards means twice the deliberation time, which either means longer deliberation periods or more judges.

There was actually More deliberation time required this year, due to the merging of the sub-division fields. I judged on Tesla. We followed the normal process, and eventually got down to a team pick for each award, just like any other Regional. Then, we did a merge, which consisted of deliberating for each award the team from each field should get. This took approx. 1.5 hours for our 2 fields, Archimedes and Tesla, and probably similar timing for other divisions.

I think the main reason why they decided to do the merge was to make the award ceremony less chaotic, though I could be wrong.

[Metonym]

My understanding is that SRE is in charge of scripting all of those ceremonies and handling the majority of the production. That's what they're paid to do and manage.

I was lucky enough to have field side access the entire event and since no PNW teams made it to the carpet of Einstein (492), I just wrote some notes covering problems in the production during Einstein.

1. Camera ops don't understand where the action is.
2. FMS pops in and out
3. Interviewer and interviewee didn't feel comfortable. Should be dropped.
4. Overhead shot was terrible, should have done an angle shot.
5. Spectators want to see the robots not the kids, however reaction shots are acceptable.
6. Some shots were just grainy to the point that it felt like 2005. My phone can stream better footage.


These are just a few problems I had with the production. There were definitely more problems, but I ended up dozing off too much to remember.

[marshall]

There was actually More deliberation time required this year, due to the merging of the sub-division fields. I judged on Tesla. We followed the normal process, and eventually got down to a team pick for each award, just like any other Regional. Then, we did a merge, which consisted of deliberating for each award the team from each field should get. This took approx. 1.5 hours for our 2 fields, Archimedes and Tesla, and probably similar timing for other divisions.

I think the main reason why they decided to do the merge was to make the award ceremony less chaotic, though I could be wrong.

I feel like this merging was really under-publicized. Most of the teams I talked to didn't know that was happening. I'm sure we all just missed some blog post or something but I feel like it could have been better communicated.

[Carolyn_Grace]

(Edit: Carolyn, I'm pretty confident you know all of this, I mostly typed it up for folks who haven't been on the other side of the event. There's a ton that has to come together to make a ceremony go off. And there ARE quite a few different groups that each have distinct leadership.)

Yes, I do. Thank you for acknowledging that.

What you're saying does not go against my point:
There is a ton that has to come together. There are quite a few different groups with distinct leadership. They need to work better together. They need to communicate better. It needs to be fixed. That's my point.

Side note:
I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to help manage one of the Einstein fields. It was a fantastic experience. I already sent my feedback to some people in charge, and received a great email in return from one. I do believe they're open for improvements on an already mostly successful system, and that's all I want.

I said it in a tweet yesterday: Even success needs iteration in order to be more successful in the future.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Yes, I do. Thank you for acknowledging that.

What you're saying does not go against my point:
There is a ton that has to come together. There are quite a few different groups with distinct leadership. They need to work better together. They need to communicate better. It needs to be fixed. That's my point.

Side note:
I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to help manage one of the Einstein fields. It was a fantastic experience. I already sent my feedback to some people in charge, and received a great email in return from one. I do believe they're open for improvements on an already mostly successful system, and that's all I want.

I said it in a tweet yesterday: Even success needs iteration in order to be more successful in the future.

I think we are in violent agreement. (seems to be a recurring theme for us) I just wanted to make sure it wasn't just a jab at SRE alone. I agree that better communication would make for a better event for everyone.

[Bob Steele]

I'm going to be pretty blunt here:

All Show Ready, A/V, or any production staff should always be physically paired with a knowledgeable FIRST person.

Carolyn..you are totally correct. I will give an example.
We had to come out on the field to make sure we could connect on Thursday morning. We were on Newton. We had some time... I spoke with the camera people...They had no clue what the game was about or what was going to happen.

I happily went over the game with them and suggested some areas of special interest that they might want to look for (ie coopertition area during quals, the recycling cans at the beginning, the human loading areas... the landfill... the scoring positions... I tried to help them see how the action would evolve on the field so they could understand what people might want to see.

I don't know if this ended up with a better product for Newton but they were hungry to find out what they needed to do. It seemed that no one had even gone over the game with them.

I checked back with them during quals and tried to see if they had any questions.

Life behind a camera for all of those hours can be pretty boring... especially when they have no one giving them any critique of how they are doing things. They can't even see what they are producing because someone else must be doing the production (camera switching,... etc)

At the end I went back, thanked them for their work and asked them if they had a good time and they smiled and said yes. I may have been one of very few that ever even talked to them during the entire time. I hope that wasn't true....

Putting a knowledgeable FIRST person with them who could assess the shots and the way thing were handled could have really made the production better. The little help I could provide might have been something but putting someone with a good idea of what people want to see is vital.

One of the reasons our PNW video crews put out a good product is that they are all team affiliated... many are students.... they know what THEY want to see... and they go after it.

I think all of the good video production that is going on is due in great part to the people doing it and their knowledge of the game and what those watching want and need to see.

Yes the equipment is important...but the people operating the equipment are more important. My hat goes off to all of the PNW video staff for the entire year and what they accomplished. I am sure the other video crews from around the rest of FIRST can say the same thing....

thanks for bringing this up Carolyn

[MasterMentor]

As I said before: why is it that many events can be managed without Show Ready and have a better production overall? What are they doing to have success?

I'm curious as to what specifically are your metrics for success?

[MasterMentor]

From what I gather, sending scores to FIRST's servers required a full database upload from FMS, which was slow due to the limited bandwidth. A match score should only be a few KB. The problem seems to be that FIRST hacked the API to use the data from the full database dump instead of implementing a lower overhead solution.
The way it was explained to me by one of the FIRST guys, what's uploaded is a difference between what's already in the "cloud" and what's on the scoring computer, based on tracking information stored on the scoring computer. In most cases the first upload can be "involved", but every subsequent upload is quite small.

[Travis Hoffman]

It sure would be spiffy if FIRST provided us an actual pit area with pipe/drape, signage, and power BEFORE we arrived to load in (see below). It sure would be spiffy if we didn't have to waste our time finding someone who could correct this issue and then wait around for them to find the myriad other people who actually were permitted to perform the labor to correct the various omissions.

Maybe we had to pay extra for that privilege, not sure....

[RoboMom]

I actually think Show Ready adds a nice polish to the events. They just bit off more than they could chew this time around. When things start to go south some things needed to be cut loose for the sake of the show going on.
Now that they know what they are up against I suspect they will do a much better job next year.

My understanding was that FIRST took over handling some things that were formerly managed by SRE. This made trying to find answers and especially accountability a tougher road to navigate this year.

There was also a new AV company.

[Eugene Fang]

The way it was explained to me by one of the FIRST guys, what's uploaded is a difference between what's already in the "cloud" and what's on the scoring computer, based on tracking information stored on the scoring computer. In most cases the first upload can be "involved", but every subsequent upload is quite small.

It would only make sense to upload only the difference. What doesn't make sense, then, is why it would take so long to upload between matches. Are robot/field logs also being uploaded, not just the scores?

[GaryVoshol]

You can't double the size of the playoffs, and then add only an hour to the schedule to compensate. Yes, I'm talking about you, FiM and MSC. And it didn't help anything that the hour was taken up by a speech and award given by Dean to the governor, and by a field delay.

Regarding the MSC productions, RoboZone had the whole season to evolve and had excellent mentor direction in the first place. Jim Zondag for sure, but I'm sure there were others.

The crew from the PBS station that makes the MSC special also does their homework. They come to districts to see how the game goes, what kind of camera angles they will need, etc. And they often practice during the qualifications at MSC so they have it down before we get to playoffs. Not that there's no issues, like the time a couple years ago we had to convince the boom camera operator that he couldn't put the camera in the goal mouth because it would block game pieces. But in general, they do a good job of preparation to get the production values high.

I think this is the kind of preparation and partnership Carolyn wants to see between SRE and FIRST.

[RoboMom]

My perspective was from the Information Booth, aka, the crossroads of the worlds. Over the past 5 years - I believe I have heard every question there is out there dealing with team questions, volunteer questions, spectator questions, family questions, venue questions, first aid questions, and FIRST program questions (on and on).

We invite spectators in. We advertise the event at every Metro link stop and throughout St. Louis. Bring the kids! See robots!

Well...maybe. On Sat. at noon badging was packed up and moved out. But the throngs of people and lots and lots of kids came pouring in. We invited them! But think about this. What is there for them to do on Sat. afternoon.? FLL was closed. The pits were closed to the public. The Innovation Faire closed at 2. And FRC, if you found your way to the Dome - was it a 2 hour break???The Student Ambassadors were also packed up. And Union Station was shutting down.

What are we showing exactly?

And it was interesting that badging, which was SUCH A PRIORITY, on all the other days, causing some mentors and teams to stand in horrible lines on Wed. for 2+ hours (until it was decided to call off the required badging, BUT required to resume on Thurs - so teams would not miss the 5pm drivers meeting) and then it took at least 5 minutes to fill in the information for each badge, print it out, put in in the sleeve, put on the lanyard if the person is not pre-registered. But suddenly it become a non-priority on Sat. at noon. Boom. BUT how does that information get out to all house people so they know the change in status and that badges were no longer needed? It was a bit bumpy.

And suddenly, how do the VIPs get badges, and find their way to the VIP area and get access?

So the volunteers in the Info Booth are doing our best to give out the right info, and come up with suggested activities and actions and explaining what FIRST is.

[RoboMom]

We didn't stay for closing ceremonies, but moving everyone to the opposite side of the dome just isn't a good idea. Additionally, I heard that Dean talked for almost two hours, which is just not okay. His message is important, but again things need to be on schedule and entertaining.

He did not talk for two hours. It was closer to 25 minutes.

[Josh Fox]

My understanding was that FIRST took over handling some things that were formerly managed by SRE. This made trying to find answers and especially accountability a tougher road to navigate this year.

There was also a new AV company.

While we're talking about AV...

I'm not sure how other fields were, but it seemed like every day when we came in the volume of the sound effects and MCs on Galileo were unreasonably loud. I had to go down stadium-side and get a volunteer's attention and ask them if they could ask the audio guy to turn it down several times, and frequently it seemed as if they did nothing. I heard numerous complaints from students, parents, and friends on our team and others around us.

Aside from the volume issues, there were several times when an MC's mic was clearly left on while they were trying to carry on a conversation at the side of the field mid-match, which didn't combine well with the GA calling the match and music playing. I mostly only heard snippets of Mark Leon talking about outer space (which is welcome any other time), but it was very distracting. The timing of music being turned on fairly consistently for the last 1/3rd or so of several subdivision awards speeches Saturday was also irritating. If we're trying to celebrate what teams are doing, it'd be great if we could hear what the awards were for.

[RoboMom]

While we're talking about AV...

I'm not sure how other fields were, but it seemed like every day when we came in the volume of the sound effects and MCs on Galileo were unreasonably loud. I had to go down stadium-side and get a volunteer's attention and ask them if they could ask the audio guy to turn it down several times, and frequently it seemed as if they did nothing. I heard numerous complaints from students, parents, and friends on our team and others around us.

Aside from the volume issues, there were several times when an MC's mic was clearly left on while they were trying to carry on a conversation at the side of the field mid-match, which didn't combine well with the GA calling the match and music playing. I mostly only heard snippets of Mark Leon talking about outer space (which is welcome any other time), but it was very distracting. The timing of music being turned on fairly consistently for the last 1/3rd or so of several subdivision awards speeches Saturday was also irritating. If we're trying to celebrate what teams are doing, it'd be great if we could hear what the awards were for.

We got many reports at the "crossroads of the worlds" re: sound levels esp. on Galileo. They were all reported. It appears this was a struggle over many days.

[Bertman]

I think that it was demotivating for teams that worked hard all year to find that the divisions were combined and fewer awards were given. There should have be an EI, an Control, etc.. for each division.

I was also disappointed that the game was essentially a FLL game on steroids with no interaction between field halves, no strategy or opportunity for defense, etc... I personally feel that watching this game was on par to watching paint dry.

FIRST is an extremely expensive activity and I feel that teams deserve a better game than one that seems like an afterthought or teams should have a 48 hour period after kickoff to request a refund. Maybe then the GDC will come up with a game that teams would be able compete on a various levels.

[Mr V]

Putting a knowledgeable FIRST person with them who could assess the shots and the way thing were handled could have really made the production better. The little help I could provide might have been something but putting someone with a good idea of what people want to see is vital.

One of the reasons our PNW video crews put out a good product is that they are all team affiliated... many are students.... they know what THEY want to see... and they go after it.

I think all of the good video production that is going on is due in great part to the people doing it and their knowledge of the game and what those watching want and need to see.

Yes the equipment is important...but the people operating the equipment are more important. My hat goes off to all of the PNW video staff for the entire year and what they accomplished. I am sure the other video crews from around the rest of FIRST can say the same thing....

thanks for bringing this up Carolyn

I was going to say something similar. For the other aspects the SRE people know what needs to be done and have done it before. However for the video you really need someone behind the camera and switcher who knows/plays the game and shows what they would want to see which most of the time will be what the audience wants to see. Sure there will always be cases where that big play is missed because they can't have a camera focused on every robot all of the time.

Of course in the PNW district the district volunteers and staff run every aspect of the production at the district events. At the DCMP a production company is hired and they provide the lighting and audio though the video and streaming was done by some of the same people who handled it at the district events.

[Patrick Flynn]

FIRST needs to put their long standing teams at a higher priority than mass expansion, and they need to hold some real feedback sessions with teams or an advisory panel of teams, because it seems they have a mission of what they're trying to do, and it doesn't always align with what the teams want and need.

Also, the timing of the Chairman's Award and other top awards needs to be communicated clearly, before any music festival or dance party, and certainly before everyone leaves.

I'll add quickly that while the championship in person is a great experience, I feel like those unable to attend and have to watch through the webcasts were treated somewhat poorly.

Also, there was just poor scheduling on the behalf of award announcements. Not once throughout the entire Einstein broadcast was it mentioned that Chairman's would be presented at the concert, and that concert in turn is streamed on the exact same stream. At the very least, it could be mentioned in the passing when the awards will be announced, instead of leaving all of us viewers confused about when it will happened.


Either stick to the published schedule, or have ubiquitous video screens showing when things are really going to happen.


Once again, FIRST totally dropped the ball on making sure people can follow events from home. The Championship streams were awful, and scores and rankings weren't event updating through most of the weekend. It is 2015. Why do PNW, FiM, dozens of regionals, or Chezy Champs have better streams than the FIRST Championship?


Plenty of things to go in both threads, but my initial though about Champs itself is the level to which badges/lanyards were regulated.
Even an, 'I'm going to the stands, my badge is there' was responded to with a, 'You need to go down to the registration desk'. Not to mention the fact that they were only allowing one direction at a time Saturday morning between the pits and stands, even going as far as cutting off teams from walking together...


Seems like there is a recurring theme here that no one has flat out said yet:
FIRST dropped the ball with communication this year.

From not knowing what the badges were, or when i needed them, or where to get them.
The last minute 2 championship announcement.
Poor communication about what was going on in the arena and when.
So many aspects of this year could have been improved with better communicate on FIRSTs part.

[5reided]

Seems like there is a recurring theme here that no one has flat out said yet:
FIRST dropped the ball with communication this year.

From not knowing what the badges were, or when i needed them, or where to get them.
The last minute 2 championship announcement.
Poor communication about what was going on in the arena and when.
So many aspects of this year could have been improved with better communicate on FIRSTs part.

From what I could tell, a team would need to check all of the following in order to know all of the available information about the Championship:

FRC Administrative Manual
FRC Game Manual
Championship A-to-Z Guide
FRC Championship Event page
FIRST Championship web site
FRC Blog
Team e-mail blasts
FIRST social media accounts
Documents in the team registration packet
Pit Admin announcements
Explanations from volunteers

It seemed that most (but certainly not all) of the information was out there somewhere, but it was in so many places (and in some cases made available so last-minute) that most teams couldn't keep up with them all, and some teams don't even know everywhere to look.

[sanddrag]

Don't forget the app. It had the conference times, but lacked team divisions and pit area locations, and often crashed or didn't load properly.

[The other Gabe]

Not you in particular, just large teams that stand in front. Huge pet peeve.

that's why we do our obnoxiously loud cheering from the back :P

[Navid Shafa]

From what I could tell, a team would need to check all of the following in order to know all of the available information about the Championship:

FRC Administrative Manual
FRC Game Manual
Championship A-to-Z Guide
FRC Championship Event page
FIRST Championship web site
FRC Blog
Team e-mail blasts
FIRST social media accounts
Documents in the team registration packet
Pit Admin announcements
Explanations from volunteers

It seemed that most (but certainly not all) of the information was out there somewhere, but it was in so many places (and in some cases made available so last-minute) that most teams couldn't keep up with them all, and some teams don't even know everywhere to look.

^THIS^

Even as a veteran of FRC, the shear amount of communications/announcements, to-do list items, and media to follow were astronomical. To keep up with all that, on top of running a team and building a robot was daunting for a first year coach...

[Taylor]

My perspective was from the Information Booth, aka, the crossroads of the worlds. Over the past 5 years - I believe I have heard every question there is out there dealing with team questions, volunteer questions, spectator questions, family questions, venue questions, first aid questions, and FIRST program questions (on and on).

We invite spectators in. We advertise the event at every Metro link stop and throughout St. Louis. Bring the kids! See robots!

Well...maybe. On Sat. at noon badging was packed up and moved out. But the throngs of people and lots and lots of kids came pouring in. We invited them! But think about this. What is there for them to do on Sat. afternoon.? FLL was closed. The pits were closed to the public. The Innovation Faire closed at 2. And FRC, if you found your way to the Dome - was it a 2 hour break???The Student Ambassadors were also packed up. And Union Station was shutting down.

What are we showing exactly?

And it was interesting that badging, which was SUCH A PRIORITY, on all the other days, causing some mentors and teams to stand in horrible lines on Wed. for 2+ hours (until it was decided to call off the required badging, BUT required to resume on Thurs - so teams would not miss the 5pm drivers meeting) and then it took at least 5 minutes to fill in the information for each badge, print it out, put in in the sleeve, put on the lanyard if the person is not pre-registered. But suddenly it become a non-priority on Sat. at noon. Boom. BUT how does that information get out to all house people so they know the change in status and that badges were no longer needed? It was a bit bumpy.

And suddenly, how do the VIPs get badges, and find their way to the VIP area and get access?

So the volunteers in the Info Booth are doing our best to give out the right info, and come up with suggested activities and actions and explaining what FIRST is.
Speaking as a spectator, I can say Jenny is 100% on the mark.
We wanted to experience the CMP, but didn't want to take time off work or our kids out of school. So my wife, two boys, a fellow mentor, and I stayed Friday night in Collinsville and went to the event on Saturday.
We arrived about 8:45 local time, were instantly told we weren't allowed in without proper identification. We made our way to the information booth, said hi to Jenny, and waited some time* for personal badges to be printed.
We went to the pits, which were a ghost town. (apparently this was during alliance selections, but ev-ery-bo-dy was gone).
We tried to watch some matches, but event staff didn't let us through to the EJD.

The best part of the day was our lunch at OverUnder.

As I said before, if the flagship world championship bores 6- and 3-year-old boys to tears, it's not doing it right.

I will not be taking my family back to the CMP as Saturday spectators.

*I don't know exactly how long it was, but it was enough time for my pregnant wife and 3yo boy to go to the bathroom, which isn't a fast feat.

[JesseK]

I forgot a pretty frustrating snippet from this season, and it started back at Day 0.

The game manual web viewer was worthless. Absolutely not worth the electric energy, bandwidth and time it took to load it. It wouldn't load at work, for whatever reason. It wouldn't load on my phone. At home when it did load it didn't have a search function. Search is critical when trying to vet a creative idea. I magically found the button for keyboard shortcuts though, phew! There was no skimming to a page easily recognized by its graphics for a quick reference because each page had to load individually. There was no section-by-section reference or TOC. It was impossible to directly link to a rule in an online discussion.

The rules are tough enough to follow given the cross-referencing of definitions, graphics, blue boxes and actual rule text in the manual. 2013 & 2014's online manual were great. 2015 was definitely a step backwards. While I wouldn't say it was as bad as the Champs Hotels website, it definitely ranks pretty far down on my list of unusable websites.

The PDF worked fine, but had to be re-downloaded every Tues/Fri after updates.

[Taylor]

When the manual app did work (not often), it would not zoom or display landscape.

[Navid Shafa]

I forgot a pretty frustrating snippet from this season, and it started back at Day 0.

The game manual web viewer was worthless. Absolutely not worth the electric energy, bandwidth and time it took to load it. It wouldn't load at work, for whatever reason. It wouldn't load on my phone. At home when it did load it didn't have a search function. Search is critical when trying to vet a creative idea. I magically found the button for keyboard shortcuts though, phew! There was no skimming to a page easily recognized by its graphics for a quick reference because each page had to load individually. There was no section-by-section reference or TOC. It was impossible to directly link to a rule in an online discussion.

The rules are tough enough to follow given the cross-referencing of definitions, graphics, blue boxes and actual rule text in the manual. 2013 & 2014's online manual were great. 2015 was definitely a step backwards. While I wouldn't say it was as bad as the Champs Hotels website, it definitely ranks pretty far down on my list of unusable websites.

The PDF worked fine, but had to be re-downloaded every Tues/Fri after updates.

Seconded. In Wholehearted agreement.

[Qbot2640]

I've just thought of two, that have been pet peeves for several years now:
(1) Create at minimum one controlled horizontal dimensioned drawing of the entire field with all the basic measurements (wall to platforms, wall to staging boxes, lengths, widths etc.) and put it in the game manual, so we don't have to analyze several different game drawings to figure out how far to move in auto (for example). Additional vertical drawings with the heights of the tote chute, the step, scoring platforms, etc. would also be nice - with the emphasis on putting as much as possible of this vital data into a single drawing in the manual.
And
(2) Some tweaks were made to TIMS registration with respect to youth protection, but I still have had to sit down next to parents and members and work together in some cases to get their registrations completed...and I still have potential members that create registration accounts then decide not to participate, thus I have a bunch of incomplete non-members that I would like to just completely delete from our roster ("rejecting" a request does not remove them from the roster). FIRST needs to give team leads the ability to create and delete accounts, then have the members and their parents log into them to fill in the information.

[Siri]

(1) Create at minimum one controlled horizontal dimensioned drawing of the entire field with all the basic measurements (wall to platforms, wall to staging boxes, lengths, widths etc.) and put it in the game manual, so we don't have to analyze several different game drawings to figure out how far to move in auto (for example). Additional vertical drawings with the heights of the tote chute, the step, scoring platforms, etc. would also be nice - with the emphasis on putting as much as possible of this vital data into a single drawing in the manual.And publish official CAD of the arena (or at least the field).

[Mr. Tatorscout]

I'd really like to understand what the logic is behind the badges. They don't ask for ID. So any schmoe could walk in and say his name was Engelbert Humperdink and get a badge made. Boy, kids, doesn't that make you feel safer?

My nephew visited and had to carry his kid all over the place after being told three different locations to go for the badge. Then they just asked his name and made a badge. The entire premise was ridiculous.

[Qbot2640]

...So any schmoe could walk in and say his name was Engelbert Humperdink and get a badge made. Boy, kids, doesn't that make you feel safer?...

I didn't have to look into the post header to see you were a team mentor. Referencing "Engelbert Humperdink" dates you around my age. Thanks for the smile!

How many Engelberts did you encounter in Saint Louis?

[JB987]

I heard one of the purposes of the badges was to try and provide a more accurate head count...requested by representatives of the new Champs local organizers/supporters.

[cgmv123]

I heard one of the purposes of the badges was to try and provide a more accurate head count...requested by representatives of the new Champs local organizers/supporters.

If you stuck around for the closing ceremonies/finale, Don Bossi was able to give an attendee count to the nearest person. I don't know how accurate it was, but it was certainly precise.

[IKE]

If you stuck around for the closing ceremonies/finale, Don Bossi was able to give an attendee count to the nearest person. I don't know how accurate it was, but it was certainly precise.

When I counted heads, I got nowhere near his number, so I think a bunch of teams must have left due to the delay of the finale....:p

[SteveGPage]

I've read through about 25% of the comments, and finally got to the TL;DR point. I know that Frank and FIRST HQ take what is said here seriously, so to add the aggregation of the previous comments, here are my thoughts.

I kept saying that I was sure this season would eventually win me over, as other seasons have - to some degree, I even came to appreciate Lunacy. This season never did. Granted, it was a unique engineering challenge, and I believe that our students, from that perspective, learned a great deal. But FIRST isn't just about the robots (although, I will come back to that concern in a moment), we did this to change the culture. We want to raise up the next generation of Scientists, Technologists, Engineers and Mathematicians - AKA, STEM. Warehouse demos aren't going to get us there. As I sat in the stands watching what was supposed to be the pentacle of the season, the finals on Einstein - I couldn't get excited about it. I was happy for the teams who were there, but the competition had no excitement. There wasn't that level of tension that previous years had. Visitors, friends, and family members who watched it, only would watch it when my team was playing, because it couldn't hold their attention either. I am worried how many students, mentors - as well as perspective new students and mentors we lost in the last 4 months. I have heard from several who won't be back. That makes me very sad.

I said above that FIRST isn't about the robots, but to change the culture. Just as the finals on Einstein celebrates the achievements on the building of the robot, the Chairman's Award is the celebration on how teams have done changing the culture. I know that the finale was supposed to be where that took place, it's own stage, and as much as there was good intentions to do so - that absolutely did not happen. It felt as if the it was being shoved to the end, when so few were there to celebrate with them. That's just wrong. We, because of our arrangements, had a charter bus to catch and tried to stay as long as we could - hours after the award should have been given, but in the end had to leave before the announcement was made. FIRST should consider itself fortunate that the winning team was still there.

FIRST needs to re-evaluate how things are done, and if they align with their core values and mission. This season didn't feel like it did.

[The other Gabe]

- Mecanum. We've done it once, and I hope we never do it again. It's confirmed what I thought, and much more. I never would have expected us to get sucked into the "mecanum trap*," but we did, and it wasn't fun. I'm looking forward to the return of defense so we won't do this again. That said, it was nice to see it well implemented by many teams.
* My name for the idea that omni-directional movement is important enough that spending time on a drivetrain that we've never tried before, and will spend a significant amount of time on, will help us in the end. (Okay, it's just team-specific, but it was something I learned this year...)



we got sucked into the H-drive trap... While it was a lot of fun to have a drive train different than tank for the first time ever, it prevented us from bringing the totes inside the robot as far as possible, making our stacks a bit less stable (although a variety of things played into that). it also weighed a lot for something the drivers have said they probably could have done without

[The other Gabe]

You may not be, but you have to understand that in the spirit of broadening the audience of FIRST and "ramping up" the cool factor of the Championship event, it's not a bad idea. While it wasn't executed in the best way possible, I can see the vision that FIRST is aiming for, and I think it has merit.

Many people attend championships for reasons other than robots. The high level of energy. The intense and grand atmosphere. The feeling that you are a part of something greater than yourself. Meeting people from all over the world. And yes, seeing and possibly meeting some big name individuals.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with that. Please remember this in the future.

It still would have been nice for me to have all the awards happen and then go off on the concert & whatever: I had not realized the time and I was really hungry during the DJ time, and I also got a headache from the excess of bass (and other audio problems from ee-ee-arlii-ii-iier)

[The other Gabe]

but guys...it's not about the robots. it is about the students....

as a student I want better video quality so I can watch more robots

[KevinRo]

Encouraging these lower level events to try and achieve quality video as a goal would be great. Talking with the AV crew from PNW several times, I know it is a lot of work and acquiring the quality equipment they have is not necessarily cheap either. But if FIRST could help support teams in finding the funding, resources, and volunteers to pull it off would be a good start.

I am happy there is so much interest in this subject. I believe that a great stream adds immense value to our events, which is why we (PNW) put together a strong video system and team. It allows others to be avid fans. It allows for schools across the region to show large numbers of students the dream of FIRST: To give recognition to science and technology.

The issue for FIRST is that video production is not in their core competencies. Shouldn't be either, they have enough to do. When they outsource the video production to others, the costs are surprising. It was cheaper for me to purchase all of the equipment for the PNW streaming setup than it was to hire a professional crew for a single event. Since we do 11 FRC events a year, the value proposition is quite reasonable. It cost us less than $1500 per event the first year. Subsequent years have about a 10% replacement / repair rate. So we spend about $3,000 a year (we have two full systems) in replacement cables and other enhancements.

To make this successful, a new cache of volunteer knowledge is required. The PNW took this on a couple of years ago knowing that a few dedicated individuals and a handful of students could put together a high class broadcast.

Our equipment is very reasonable quality, simple to use, and is good for 4 to 5 years. We have finished our second year. Each setup cost about $16,000 to put together. I shopped explicitly for equipment that would be suitable to be run by students, yet meets the standards for broadcast quality. As such, we end up with about 8 volunteers a week. Three of them need some level of training, and one technical director to help with the details needs a substantial (yet very doable) amount of training.

I am open to sharing everything we know with the greater FIRST community. FIRST is actively looking into how to improve the stream quality at all FRC events. Sometimes doing it with knowledgeable volunteers is a better approach. Keep in mind, most of the staff at an FRC event are volunteers. Integrating the volunteers in with the A/V company (Three Rivers, Sargent, or other local guys) isn't really a problem. It requires a set of volunteers to step forward and own it. Each show requires at least one adult to take ownership and to lead a group of other volunteers (adults and students)

Are you that person?

Kevin Ross
PNW District Chairman

[kgargiulo]

And publish official CAD of the arena (or at least the field).

PTC has made a full 3d model of the field available every season for many years. You can measure anything from it. You don't even need to use Creo for your CAD system, as you can install free lightweight visualization software or the full blown Creo and just use it as a viewer. Measurement works either way.

It is usually available right at kick off, just like the KOP CAD models. Sometimes it is a little later, GDC doesn't release it to PTC any earlier than the rest of us, so the unique features have to be modeled before being posted.

Our team has simulated robot position/clearance digitally before we cut the first piece of metal, bUT weve only scratched the surface of simulation. I think there is a lot of opportunity for growth and learning in the area of a "digital twin" robot among FRC teams.

Disclosure: I work for PTC. Nothing above depends on whether you use our software to model your competition robot, its free for everyone in FIRST. Including student home use.

[BlueLipstick]

To the suggestions that we smaller teams should just suck it up and get in there and save seats like the big boys:

No.

My proposed solution would be adding an additional "No Saved Seats Period" seating zone around the current match team viewing area. Preferably with large-print easy to read signs and an usher or two to cut down on arguments. Teams would be welcome to reserve space outside of this zone as a home base, but seat saving in the zone would be banned or strictly curtailed to only support scouting teams (1-2 seats per person, up to 4 saved seats per team). This would obviously take some tweaking, but I think it'd work a bit better than the jungle rules that currently seem to reign in the stands.

That's probably the best solution I've heard so far. The scouting excuse is the most common, and it makes sense that scouts need good seats. This solution would also end the incessant battle between teams standing up and cheering and scouts in the back yelling for them to sit.

[tcjinaz]

People actually cheered when those stacks fell over? That's just terrible, I'm so sorry. You guys are an amazing team and constantly inspire me, I hope that doesn't bring you guys down too much.

"We're fighting for our right to boo the Dodgers"
(see a few WWII movies)

[Citrus Dad]

Seat saving was a problem. I know it's theoretically not allowed, but having to explain...

My proposed solution would be adding an additional "No Saved Seats Period" seating zone around the current match team viewing area. Preferably with large-print easy to read signs and an usher or two to cut down on arguments. Teams would be welcome to reserve space outside of this zone as a home base, but seat saving in the zone would be banned or strictly curtailed to only support scouting teams (1-2 seats per person, up to 4 saved seats per team). This would obviously take some tweaking, but I think it'd work a bit better than the jungle rules that currently seem to reign in the stands.

I agree with this sentiment. I've posted about this in the past. FIRST is being naive if they believe that "no saving seats" can be enforced. In fact it will lead to chaos if truly adhered to as individuals would have to take everything with them when they went to the restroom and find a new seat when they come back. The real answer is to better organize the seat allocations.

My proposal is as follows. Now that FIRST is giving badges to everyone they can use those badges to allocate seating.

- Each team is allocated a set of seats for scouts in the lower area between the arena end lines. Teams can claim up to 10 or 12 seats (that's a pretty typical true scouting crew size). The teams will inform FIRST beforehand of how many seats they need, and FIRST will segment off those areas. They can rotate scouts through those seats from their other seating sections (see below). Most importantly--no "spirit" displays are allowed in this section. Those sitting in these seats are part of the competitive team and this section should be considered part of the competitive area.
- A section along the front 2 rows is allocated for VIPs and other with special badges. It is important not to OVER allocate the numbers of these seats.
- Non-scout members of the teams can save up to 20 seats in the larger area surrounding the scout area. Spirit displays are allowed in this area. The number of seats saved may be set as a proportion of the badges issued to the team. FIRST should know the seat count for
- Open seating is available outside of this area. No seat saving is allowed in that area.

[Citrus Dad]

People actually cheered when those stacks fell over? That's just terrible, I'm so sorry. You guys are an amazing team and constantly inspire me, I hope that doesn't bring you guys down too much.

That was the nature of this year's game and the result of having lack of defense. Basing advancement entirely on cumulative performance instead of win/loss further exacerbated this.

[The other Gabe]

That was the nature of this year's game and the result of having lack of defense. Basing advancement entirely on cumulative performance instead of win/loss further exacerbated this.

I think someone said this earlier: the game should be renamed Schadenfreude rush

[JimInNJ]

I am happy there is so much interest in this subject. I believe that a great stream adds immense value to our events, which is why we (PNW) put together a strong video system and team. It allows others to be avid fans. It allows for schools across the region to show large numbers of students the dream of FIRST: To give recognition to science and technology.

The issue for FIRST is that video production is not in their core competencies. Shouldn't be either, they have enough to do. When they outsource the video production to others, the costs are surprising. It was cheaper for me to purchase all of the equipment for the PNW streaming setup than it was to hire a professional crew for a single event. Since we do 11 FRC events a year, the value proposition is quite reasonable. It cost us less than $1500 per event the first year. Subsequent years have about a 10% replacement / repair rate. So we spend about $3,000 a year (we have two full systems) in replacement cables and other enhancements.

To make this successful, a new cache of volunteer knowledge is required. The PNW took this on a couple of years ago knowing that a few dedicated individuals and a handful of students could put together a high class broadcast.

Our equipment is very reasonable quality, simple to use, and is good for 4 to 5 years. We have finished our second year. Each setup cost about $16,000 to put together. I shopped explicitly for equipment that would be suitable to be run by students, yet meets the standards for broadcast quality. As such, we end up with about 8 volunteers a week. Three of them need some level of training, and one technical director to help with the details needs a substantial (yet very doable) amount of training.

I am open to sharing everything we know with the greater FIRST community. FIRST is actively looking into how to improve the stream quality at all FRC events. Sometimes doing it with knowledgeable volunteers is a better approach. Keep in mind, most of the staff at an FRC event are volunteers. Integrating the volunteers in with the A/V company (Three Rivers, Sargent, or other local guys) isn't really a problem. It requires a set of volunteers to step forward and own it. Each show requires at least one adult to take ownership and to lead a group of other volunteers (adults and students)

Are you that person?

Kevin Ross
PNW District Chairman

I couldn't agree more that FIRST streaming has been spotty at best. I'm curious about where you get a clean outbound path at all of these different venues? Do you contract with a local carrier for temporary bandwidth, or do all of your venues have sufficient bandwidth available to provision your outbound stream in addition to all of the normal traffic?

Professional curiosity requires me to ask about your hardware setup. Do you stream HD or standard Def? How many cameras, lockoff, tripod or handheld? Do you take the interface from the scoring system? How big does your car/truck need to be to haul all of this gear around? What switch/SEG? Do you carry lighting as well? Sorry for all the questions, I'm preparing for a local group request that goes " Hey, you do video stuff at work, what can you do for us???"

[Mr V]

I couldn't agree more that FIRST streaming has been spotty at best. I'm curious about where you get a clean outbound path at all of these different venues? Do you contract with a local carrier for temporary bandwidth, or do all of your venues have sufficient bandwidth available to provision your outbound stream in addition to all of the normal traffic?

Professional curiosity requires me to ask about your hardware setup. Do you stream HD or standard Def? How many cameras, lockoff, tripod or handheld? Do you take the interface from the scoring system? How big does your car/truck need to be to haul all of this gear around? What switch/SEG? Do you carry lighting as well? Sorry for all the questions, I'm preparing for a local group request that goes " Hey, you do video stuff at work, what can you do for us???"

Kevin may not make it back for awhile so I'll answer the questions that I can.

The stream is HD.
I believe we have 3 Cameras though sometimes some of the students supplement that with their own gear. Typically 2 are on tripods and one is available for handheld use.

Yes they connect to the FMS to get the score overlays.

We haul it around in a 53' trailer, but the bulk of the video equipment is in a road case aprox 2'w x 6'l x 5'h, there is a second one of the same size that is for the Audio equipment. Projectors fit in another case that has space and the screens ride on top of the Video and Audio cases. We also have a 2'w x 8'l x 3'h road case that holds the tripods for the speakers and projectors. I know that the IN district has a similar set up and I believe they haul it around in cars since the AndyMark truck that is used to haul the fields does not have room to add another road case.

No additional lighting is used.

Kevin does have a list with all of the equipment that is used which he is supposed to dig up and forward to me for the areas that are joining, or thinking about joining, the district system for the 2016 or 2017 season. When I get that I can post it.

[JimInNJ]

Kevin may not make it back for awhile so I'll answer the questions that I can.

The stream is HD.
I believe we have 3 Cameras though sometimes some of the students supplement that with their own gear. Typically 2 are on tripods and one is available for handheld use.

Yes they connect to the FMS to get the score overlays.

We haul it around in a 53' trailer, but the bulk of the video equipment is in a road case aprox 2'w x 6'l x 5'h, there is a second one of the same size that is for the Audio equipment. Projectors fit in another case that has space and the screens ride on top of the Video and Audio cases. We also have a 2'w x 8'l x 3'h road case that holds the tripods for the speakers and projectors. I know that the IN district has a similar set up and I believe they haul it around in cars since the AndyMark truck that is used to haul the fields does not have room to add another road case.

No additional lighting is used.

Kevin does have a list with all of the equipment that is used which he is supposed to dig up and forward to me for the areas that are joining, or thinking about joining, the district system for the 2016 or 2017 season. When I get that I can post it.

Thanks Eric, I appreciate the fast response. I'm guessing that your equipment rides in the truck with the field? I'm looking forward to seeing the equipment list and/or pictures of the setup. I'm still curious about the Internet access that you use to get out of the venues, as I would think that would be the biggest variable . . .

[Metonym]

Thanks Eric, I appreciate the fast response. I'm guessing that your equipment rides in the truck with the field? I'm looking forward to seeing the equipment list and/or pictures of the setup. I'm still curious about the Internet access that you use to get out of the venues, as I would think that would be the biggest variable . . .

Remember that we mainly host events at highschools, those schools have internet points that we can easily hook into. The site host can generally get permission to use the internet from the school administration. Other venues like the coliseum in Portland are outside of my knowledge.

Van Buren was wrong on one account, we rarely have a mobile camera. Usually the third camera is a full field shot. Kevin sometimes brings in his mobile cam, but not to all events. Getting usable footage from it is another problem. Students need a lot more training with it that isn't just verbal commands from the switcher.

[MsKutz]

It's the highest rookie seed award, not the highest rookie score. In previous years it was the exact same way with W/L (actually was worse in previous years since W/L could be more easily luck based).

If you are going to combine fields for awards, then both fields should have been reranked together to give out this award.

[Mr V]

Thanks Eric, I appreciate the fast response. I'm guessing that your equipment rides in the truck with the field? I'm looking forward to seeing the equipment list and/or pictures of the setup. I'm still curious about the Internet access that you use to get out of the venues, as I would think that would be the biggest variable . . .


I sent you an email about the equipment that we use. Yes it just goes in the trailer with the rest of the equipment used to produce the event. I should be able to get a picture of the cases in the next couple of days that I'll forward to you.

[Breakaway3937]

Mr V, do you mind sending me that list as well. That would be great!

[jtrv]

I don't quite agree with you. Although I think autonomous shouldn't fully determine the winner of the match - it is no fun knowing who'd win after 15 seconds - I must say the programming in FRC is in general almost trivial.

<snip>

So, to wrap up - yes, it may be better to let the auto be a little less crucial but programming must be kicked up a notch.

Alright. So what do you want from teams? What do you expect?

My team didn't get a programming mentor until our 6th year as a team. And yet we had placed second place at multiple competitions beforehand - many factors were involved in us ending second place rather than first, and while programming was one of them, it was never the predominant factor as to why. We taught ourselves everything we could about control systems, and we actually never got PID fully functional until a programming mentor joined the team - even with 3-4 programmers, one of which is now at an Ivy for CS, so it isn't like we're struggling to build the code.

When kids aren't taught Calculus until junior (2 years ahead of schedule) or senior year (1 year ahead), it's kinda difficult to introduce advanced control systems in addition to learning the ins and outs of coding a robot. Coding a robot is far different than your standard software programming, which is what we are taught in our CS classes offered here.

Sure, it may seem simple to write driveTrain.drivePID.setXDistance(4.0), but it isn't that simple when you're just starting out. In addition to a plethora of other factors going on within the team - for example, we spent a very long time on design this year - it's not really simple to just magically develop a brand new, state of the art, never-before-seen control system.

[Monochron]

When kids aren't taught Calculus until junior (2 years ahead of schedule) or senior year (1 year ahead), it's kinda difficult to introduce advanced control systems in addition to learning the ins and outs of coding a robot. Coding a robot is far different than your standard software programming, which is what we are taught in our CS classes offered here.
Even so, using the PID classes in WPI lib is relatively simple and made much more so by the plethora of tutorials found online. It is a much better approach to understand the control systems math going on in the library implementation, but that is wholly unnecessary to create a function PID loop.

In college you can likely expect to have to create the internals of the PID classes used in WPIlib (by which I mean programatically [or in some form of hardware] creating the feedback loop and designing the plant) necessitating full understanding of the system. WPILib makes it so that all you have to do for a basic loop is to just tweak k, i, and d values.

[jtrv]

Even so, using the PID classes in WPI lib is relatively simple and made much more so by the plethora of tutorials found online. It is a much better approach to understand the control systems math going on in the library implementation, but that is wholly unnecessary to create a function PID loop.

In college you can likely expect to have to create the internals of the PID classes used in WPIlib (by which I mean programatically [or in some form of hardware] creating the feedback loop and designing the plant) necessitating full understanding of the system. WPILib makes it so that all you have to do for a basic loop is to just tweak k, i, and d values.

And that's true. As for me personally, when I first started programming the bot, neither I nor the lead programmer at the time even knew about the built in PID libraries. So we tried making them by hand.

A year later, when a programming mentor joined, we hand wrote them, and never used WPI at all. And suddenly something clicked and I realized how simple it was. Just error, change in current value since last iteration, and a Riemann sum for the current and last value vs time. Plus the constants that you have to adjust.

Maybe we just didn't look in the obvious places, but even adjusting the three constants is relatively time consuming and frustrating if you don't know which value you should be adjusting for which behavior - because in reality, they aren't completely independent of each other.