Rule/parts changes

[Mr. Van]

I haven't been doing this FIRST thing for very long (2nd year), but I'm concerned by some rule changes that have been announced in the last two updates.

It is now allowed to interact with the stainless steel edge of the upper goal platform and hinges have been added to the additional hardware list.

Why were these changes made at this time? It is four weeks into the design/build season! As far as I can tell, these changes only benefit teams that didn’t follow the rules (or read their manual) to start with, while teams that designed and built according to the rules posted previously may now be at a disadvantage.

Is this sort of thing historically common? Should I hold my breath for the update that adds "Motors – any size, any amount" to the additional hardware list?

-Mr. Van
Team 599

[Wetzel]

The changes and back and forth on stuff this year is suprising to me. I think part of it may have to do with the yahoo board. This is something that they havn't done before, and the shear volume of questions may have just overwhelmed them. I hope they don't use it next year, or get fewer people working on it alone.

[Ken Leung]

I thought the Yahoo! board is a good addition to this year's question answering process. Before, teams have to e-mail questions to FIRST, and only the team asking the question will get an immediate respond. Other teams have to wait till team updates to come out.

Mean while, because the other teams aren’t aware that some questions were asked already, they will send the same questions to FIRST. FIRST used to be flooded with the similar topic questions that way in the past years.

But teams still post similar questions anyway, which is why FIRST need a good amount of people to answer questions. Reducing the people working on it will only make it worse, and slow down the answering process.

With the Yahoo! board, FIRST can now answer questions and publish the ruling ASAP, reducing the amount of similar questions, and let every team know the answer right away.

Sure, the volume of questions is overwhelming. But that's always the same with or without the Yahoo Board. Teams will e-mail the questions to FIRST anyway. The board is a better way for FIRST to organize the questions and for people within FIRST to know which questions have been answered by another person. AND the board has a nice feature of searching through the threads, making it easier for teams to look up answers or posts.

So I think it's a really good improvement to the answering process... As for whether it can be better or not, I will leave that up to you.

[Matt Ryan]

Usually they do more clarifying the current rules than change them.