Best FRC Games
 

Hi CD,

Let's decide once and for all which FRC game reigns supreme!

http://www.pubblepin.com/polls/30?t=best-frc-games

P.S. This is a tool I built for a course I'm taking. You can use it to rank anything collaboratively--top FRC teams, top FRC robots, potential robot designs for your team, etc. Feel free to use it for whatever you can think of ;)

Re: Best FRC Games
 

553 votes... Score = 1929... How are the scores determined?
http://www.pubblepin.com/polls/30?co...best-frc-games

Re: Best FRC Games
 

The scores are determined by a modified ELO algorithm, which is the algorithm used for chess players, among other things.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Breakaway ranks 6th???

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I feel like the newer games are ranking higher since most people in FIRST now that are here on CD haven't been around since the '90s. Still a really good idea, nice job!

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I suggest adding a page that summerizes the games, maybe with pictures or videos, so that the newer people like myself will get to know pre-2003 games that have no game animation. Also, this way the website can double as a nice resource.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I second this suggestion, as going by a few paragraphs on wikipedia isn't helping me get a good grasp of the games from the 90s.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Thanks for the feedback--I will keep working hard to improve it and come back with a new poll in the near future.

Also, looking at the results, it seems apparent that people vote for the games they know. For voters with 0-3 years FRC experience the top five games are an average of 2.4 years old. For voters with 4-6 years experience, its 3.8 years, and for 7-9 its 5.2 years.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Not surprising, but a heavy bias in the rankings towards recent games.

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Its still pretty surprising that breakaway ranked so low. IMHO: aim high and breakway FTW.

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All the young'uns don't know what they missed. :D A more accurate model might ask folks which years they watched/played and then normalize the results based on the number of "eligible voters".

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I personally disliked Breakaway, mostly because it discouraged different designs (even by FIRST standards) and every robot looked the same. As far as the past few years are concerned, FIRST already ends up being a bunch of very similar robots, with the most well refined design winning, but 2010 was worse than usual (really only 469 had a successful 'unique' design). Also, the issues in the ranking system early on really turned me off to it.

The only redeeming part was the end-game, which encouraged a ton of innovative designs.

To be fair, I was raised on BEST Robotics, so I have a thing for solutions that can do about 7 separate operations at once using 2 motors and maybe a servo or two. I also love plywood, PVC, and duct tape. I mean, in 2010 I made a (ridiculously successful) sub-assembly that was composed entirely of 1 motor, bits of string, an entire roll of duct tape, and two small sections of PVC pipe. Now, it was all very precise (we made at least 12 prototype versions of that thing to perfect it) and looked quite good by BEST standards, but I never saw anything quite like it the whole year.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Not to go too far off track, but all the paintings in the Louvre "look the same" if you don't know what to look for. I saw LOTS of design variance in the Breakaway bots... you just had to look beyond the low centre of gravity requirements.

Admittedly, I wouldn't be able to put up any favorites from before '03, but not only was "Aim High" the best game I've ever played, but that robot has been our "go-to demo robot" ever since. When other robots got pulled apart and scavenged for parts, the "Nerf Ball Shooter" was too cool to touch. (Okay, we stripped a couple redundant CIMs off of it... but its pushing battles were over.)

Of course, it's like picking The Beatles vs. The Stones vs. Michael Jackson vs. Elvis vs. Madonna vs. AC/DC as the best rock act ever. Fun, but relatively pointless.

Jason

Re: Best FRC Games
 

The issue I had was that most of the top teams had the same ball-grabber (clamp, with a few rollers out there too) and kicker (elastic powered blunt object, wound up by some sort of cam system). The main differences were in the drivetrain for crossing the bump (though few teams did more than just a 6-8 wheel setup. Some, like 1625, had very cool drivetrains, and others made neat suspension systems) as well as endgame devices.

Whenever I watched a round between multiple 'good' robots the difference between the winner and loser was usually whoever was able to line up their shots best and not have balls bounce out of the goals. It was just too driver-dependent for me. I'd rather see a team win because they found a way to play the game that its designers never expected, and built a completely unique robot. That's what I loved about 469, it was nearly game-breaking while being elegantly simple.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Alas, if only figuring out what makes or breaks a game were that simple. Particularly in the method that FIRST presents the games, it's hard to think outside the normal configuration when Breakaway was described best as robot soccer or Rebound Rumble as robot basketball. The description really drives the design, as many teams forget that Breakaway was not soccer reliant, but simply a name of the game where the goal was transport a ball to a hole in the wall.

Personally, I'm a Breakaway fan (With heavy bias as it was my rookie season.) Everything that year, from being the third pick of the second alliance at Greater Kansas City with 16 and 1625, to rising to the #1 Seed and first alliance captains in Oklahoma City, to striding across the floor of the Georgia Dome, was amazing. The robots, IMHO, were totally different that year too. As stated, it takes an eye that sees past the exterior generic box shape and sees what's within the box that truly amazed me.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

This discussion has come up before, and it really needs to be separated out between 3v3 and pre-3v3.

Also, how many people on the forums now actually experienced some of the older games, personally I know the games going back to 2000, but how many of the forum users now can go back to pre-3v3 games?

Re: Best FRC Games
 

3v3 didn't start until 2005 with Triple play. my 1st 2 years 2003 stack attack and 2004 FIRST Frenzy Raising the bar were 2v2. The first game I ever saw played was 2000 and I was a FLL student then.

Out of All the Games that I have been involved in 2003-now I have to say my favorite was 2006 Aim High. We did not have the best robot, and even rebuilt the robot at our first event, but I had the most fun watching that game. All the poof balls everywhere, the wide open field, the matches that you could go from winning to tied in a matter of seconds, and the race to the ramp at the end. That is also the robot that we still use for most demonstrations, the kids love throwing the balls into the hopper and watching the balls fly back out onto the ground from the rollers.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Breakaway was a lot of fun to watch at Championship or at events with multiple elite teams. But a vast majority of the time, it was painfully boring and had more 0-0 ties than just about any game I can remember (and I remember 2007). It was painfully boring in qualification matches and even during the eliminations at many regionals. While every game improves dramatically when the level of competition is increased, that curve was way too steep in Breakaway.

Add a further break for the pre-alliance era (1998 and before) as well. Possibly even another split for the much smaller scale robots of 1992 and 1993.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Looks like people really enjoy shooting balls.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Breakaway was fun to play at the highest level.

That said, if you could score 3 balls in autonomous and hang, you would almost guarantee a win in a rather high percentage of all matches. Without doing anything at all except hanging for the entire teleop period.

That is because the average OPR was just above 1, meaning the average match score was around 3.

The game was hard. 'Carrying' a ball was hard. Very hard. There was a lot of tweaking and a lot of minor improvement in even the best robots through the entire season, and there was a lot of slight variety in the ball control mechanisms.



I can't make a good comparison about the past games, but most of the post-2000 games sound really fun to play.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I'm surprised Lunacy is ranked so low :confused: , it's one of my favorites, along with breakaway

Re: Best FRC Games
 

It's not that hard to come up with the game breaking strategies. You just need some experience at approaching the game from the right perspective.

In 2006 you could win by not playing the game. If you kept the score low all that matttered was the ramp points, and pinning on the ramp was legal. Playing using these factors allowed a robot purely playing defense to control the game over scorers. Most teams didn't play this way or pick up on it but this was a way to break the game.

In 2007 the secret was to again not play the game. Don't go for long multiplier chains but instead break up the rack so the other team couldn't get the multipliers. Before they realize they're wasting time trying to get long chains they can't actually get the time ran out while you got 50 points for lifting 2 robots.

That said the GDC has been exceptionally good at blocking game breaking strategies in the the game/robot rules since 2008. That year 190 tried a game breaking strategy that many of us had come up with and discounted as illegal because as soon as they broke the plane into the previous zone it was a penalty.

Even in 2010 when the 469 robot became legal in week 2 due to a rule change it had originally been against the rules so most teams that came up with the design had already discounted it as illegal before the change giving 469 a jump on everyone else.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Stack Attack is my clear favourite as worst game. The rest are more difficult to rank.

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Mean score based on OPR is probably not the best way to evaluate that. While the mean score may be 3, I'd be willing to bet the median score was underneath 3. If you score higher than the median, you're winning more than half of the matches on average.

Those are much less "game breaking" than other game breaking strategies, and aren't even close to choke hold strategies. Not that either of those strategies couldn't succeed, but they were far from guaranteed wins (or even necessarily the most successful strategy).

If you could successfully force your opponent onto your ramp in 2006 (or they went there voluntarily), that strategy was legitimate. But if they avoided your ramp, they could easily get back to their own to counteract your ramp points. Not to mention if they outscore you in autonomous you're left with a relatively large hole to climb out of (equivalent to 2 robots on the ramp or 40% of 3 robots on the ramp).

In 2007, nothing about preventing/breaking up opponents rows stopped them from also getting their ramp points. And if the ramp points were equal, it came down to who had more on the rack. If both alliances placed 6 tubes, and your alliance placed them perfectly across the rack (to minimize potential rows) while the other alliance build two rows of 3 above one another, they win the rack by a 28-16 margin. It was a rare situation when teams denied themselves the opportunity for ramp points willingly (111 being the obvious example of a team that usually kept scoring rather than going for the end game points). And most alliances were willing to battle intensely for the key positions on the rack, and often would set defenders to stop teams from cutting off their rows.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

On an alliance level the skew isn't particularly awful. On a robot level I'm sure it is much more pronounced since you miss out on the averaging across 3 robots.

(Across qualifying matches in the FRCFMS twitter feed in 2010, the mean match score was 4.2, the median was 4)

On a related note, I've always been surprised looking at historical data at how large the gap is between winning and losing alliances. I wonder if game "goodness" can be correlated to the size of that gap...

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I'm a little surprised at how far down FIRST Frenzy is in the rankings. If you go look at some discussions here on CD from the mid to late 2000's it often rose to the top just behind Aim High. It's only one spot above Stack Attack (by a healthy margin though) which is certainly in the running for worst game ever.

I agree with the sentiments about Breakaway here. It's the season I've been least involved in FIRST since joining in high school so I was more of a spectator than anything else at our regional. It had some good Finals matches but outside of that was very difficult to watch from a spectator view due to the struggles in scoring.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I think FIRST Frenzy is now old enough that the large proportion of FRC has forgotten about it. Per Mark McLeod, the mean FRC team is only 4.4 years old, and the median team is almost certainly even younger. Even the high school students during FIRST Frenzy are probably starting to reach the point in their careers where they may have enough other time commitments that they don't mentor teams anymore.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I suppose this kind of comes down to your definition of "game breaking." I've always considered "game breaking" to imply that, if a given team can do something, there's nothing the others can do to stop them from winning. An example of that sort of "game breaking" would be 71's Flopbot in 2002, or just in general that game, where you won defacto if you controlled all three goals. By that definition, I wouldn't classify 469 as "game breaking" because there was something the opposing alliance could do, it just required them to spend almost all their efforts to thwart that particular robot.

It's more just the distinction between "excellent design/strategy" and "game breaking." "Game breaking" implies just that-- that it breaks the game. If you play good defense, there's still something the other team can do-- play better offense. A "game breaker" totally controls the game. While some of these strategies could potentially work on a qualification or practice match, I sincerely doubt that they would be equally successful in eliminations or at the Championships, which, in terms of matches, are where they actually matter.

In short, I agree that it isn't incredibly difficult to come up with a good strategy, or a good robot design if you approach the game from the right angle, but a truly game breaking design is incredibly difficult to pull off-- which is why they're called "game breakers."

My 3.14159 cents.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I love the 2006 game. I think we should do a replay of that game just one change. Use footballs.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I'm in for that!

Re: Best FRC Games
 

OCCRA did a football game a few years back. I was amazed at how easy it was to "drive up on" a football. They were using hig grip footballs, so maybe some leather ones would be different.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

IMO the fact that Logomotion, which I'd put in the bottom 5, is at #8 indicates that people are just voting for what they know, which sort of ruins the whole thing. Oh well...

Does anyone know why Rug Rage is so far below everything else, even Diabolical Dynamics? Was it that bad, or do people just not like the name, or...?

Re: Best FRC Games
 

As a quick approximation, the 1300th team on last year's team list is 3058, and their rookie season was 2009.

Our team was around in 2004, but I wasn't - I started in 2009, our seniors started in 2010, and we only have a couple of mentors left from our 2004 team.

It just goes to show that FIRST can safely recycle big chunks of a game from 8 years ago and not bore most of the people in FIRST. If they do it in a smart way, of course. Based on most of the comments I've seen about FIRST Frenzy, it would probably be pretty fun if they paid homage to the 2004 game with a new game that revisited the basic game with new twists.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

I strongly disagree. Logomotion overall was a very well designed and executed game compared to many others (i.e. stack attack, lunacy and overdrive). The tasks were simple yet allowed for a huge range in execution at all levels of experience, it was visually impactfull, the audience could follow it, and it was an always exciting game to watch.

Diabolical Dynamics has many reasons why people argue over it it but the main reason it is so maligned is that it was 4 vs 0. People didn't like going against the clock instead of a live competition.

Re: Best FRC Games
 

If you look at the site and look at individuals with 10+ years of experience, First Frenzy is first followed by Aim High. I think another version of First Frenzy with three robots on a side would be pretty interesting to play... although I am not sure if there was enough room on the field to play six robots... the center steps and hanging area took up a great deal of room. Perhaps a version of First Frenzy without the steps and with 4 movable goals.

I am not sure how individuals who have only experienced the last few games can rank those old games. I don't feel qualified to rank the first few games because I didn't play them... I wish the survey had asked that question too...the best we can do is to screen those with less experience and see what individuals with experience in at least 10+ years of games think ...

I don't mean to dismiss the younger members but i really don't know how you can rate a game if you haven't played it or at least seen lots of videos of the game (which are hard to find for the early games...)

Re: Best FRC Games
 

Coincidentally it was my rookie year as well. I couldn't stand watching matches, mostly because of the frustration of having to see a bunch of teams in qualifications try to simply push the balls into the goals and continuously have it bounce out or roll back down. Unless there was a team (or, if you got lucky, teams) with a good shooter on the field it was simply a robotic interpretation of Sisyphus and the boulder.

I will concede that there most certainly were a bunch of different ways that teams built their robots, though I found them to not make as much difference as in other years. Most other games tended to have a couple of different 'positions' to play, each requiring a distinctly styled robot. In 2009 'shooters' and 'dumpers' played the game very differently and couldn't be interchanged. In 2008 you had tiny but fast lap-bots weaving in between hurdlers like 16 and 1114 that would shoot trackballs across the field. Heck, in 2007 each team chose between any of three 'classes' with different height and weight limits. But in 2010, any rear or middle zone shooting robot could play ball-pusher in the front zone, and any good ball pusher still had a good ball-grabber and decent kicker, so they could move back as well (though obviously each robot and driver had a position they liked best).

I guess my point would be that there wasn't much in the game that necessitated making distinct design 'direction' choices and strategizing around the trade-offs associated with them.

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I agree wholeheartedly. Just as anecdotal evidence I know of only 1 other student who was on 498 in 2004 that is still involved in FIRST, and only 2 of our mentors from that season are still involved.

I think a replay of some elements of FIRST Frenzy would be awesome. A big key to that game is that the end game is worth a lot of points (10 scored balls equivalent per robot) and that the end game is shared, which made it almost impossible for all robots to score it. The only shared end game since then is Lunacy where either alliance could score the super cells. This made for interesting tactics because some alliances would go for the end game as soon as possible since it could deny their opponents the end game bonus. Our elimination alliance used this tactic at least once, hanging 2 robots and then only making 3 of your human player shots still scored 115 which was hard to overcome if your opponents had no room to hang due to your robot positioning. However hanging early runs the risk that your now un-defended opponents go crazy and put up 150 in ball points.

I totally understand why a shared end game would have been a horrible idea for many recent games, but I do wish that competitive element would be bright back.

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It's interesting to note that for both the 7-9 and 10+ years in FRC groups the 2004-2007 games make up 4 of the top 5. Is that just nostalgia from when these FIRSTers were in high school or was the GDC on top of their game?