Re: Pedestal Delays
 

Right, but my point is, using the live score as a way to base your play hasn't been a good way to base your strategy since it is not usually highly accurate. And I wouldn't count on that changing in future games.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

As much as I like and appreciate Frank's post and all the work that went into it, the blog makes no direct mention of pedestal lights at all. More refs, better field reset, and fewer FMS bugs are all great (as are the better foul rules and high goals), but do these account for all the roots causes of pedestal delays? I don't know, and Frank hasn't told me. It seemed that at least some of them were just a failure to hit "End Cycle", which is not a ref-quantity, reset-training, or FMS-quality issue.

More importantly, neither the team update nor the blog prevent a head ref from deciding that a 30 second pedestal delay is not worth a foghorn/replay. Personally, this was my major Week 1 problem. Heck, it doesn't say anything about handling a 2:19 second pedestal delay.

As long as such a devastating failure mode is theoretically possible (which is always--remember the 2011 minibot towers?), I'd like official guidance on how to handle it.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

Last year with all the Frisbees flying there was little hope of live scoring. But this year come on. If they scored a ball even every 15 seconds how hard can that be? Every time we turned our heads to the score board and saw it react the way we expected. Where did all the extra points come from in the final scoring? Our alliance, people in the audience, they'd all be scowling at the score board so it not just me. But it is our fault for not going to the question box.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

I'd like to see you try to Ref week 1.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

As a referee at Mt. Olive, you're just totally overexagerrating the parity between live scoring and actual scoring. Here are the only situations in which the final score would be 'vastly different' from the live scoring:
1. Fouls
2. A last second cycle input
3. The very few times where a cycle was inputted incorrectly (which, to me at least, only happened once).

To say that a significant amount of unexplained extra points showed up on the board after the match is absolutely wrong. And if an alliance is scoring a ball every 15 seconds? That makes it even harder for the refs.

Speaking with fellow refs, 99% of the time there was a delay (even as small as 3 seconds) in putting in the livescore was to just last minute check to make sure everything is right. Would you rather us rush to input scores and mess them up? (which I admittedly did once, but noticed it and ensured the score was corrected).

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

The other situation that can drastically affect live scoring is if a ball has gone through the high goal, the ref scores it and ends the cycle, but the ball ends up popping out. If that happened at the end of a match, you could see up to a 40 point difference between live scoring and final scoring.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

In all fairness to all the volunteers at the events. I would ask that you really take a realistic look at what actually happens during a match from any years game before you criticize some of the things that occur.

Volunteering at an event will really open your eyes to how things work. ;)

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

On top of this, they're asking refs to literally do the work of 2 people. Being a ref is never an easy job. But we do it because we enjoy the challenge.

Week 1 refs were just as frustrated as teams were. The delay in tablets and the FMS affected them just as much as the teams did. The good news from all of this is that a lot of issues have been fixed and the game and competition will only get better as the weeks pass. I'm sorry that some teams only had one shot during a week 1 regional, but they should all (minus rookies) be aware that week 1 will not go perfectly, or even smoothly most of the time.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

Lets dial this back a bit. Steven, you were there, I was there, I know hard a day it was especially since they tried to do almost all the qualifying on Saturday due to the impending storm. We were disappointed so we vented.

This is my third year and I finally have a couple of students I think are hooked on robotics. Their reaction? They'd play a third venue if we could afford it. To me that is a win we've never had before.

In the spirit of FRC lets let this go and hope for improvements on week 2.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

It's a rush when you have students asking about going to a third competition after competing isn't it. We had this happen last year and its very rewarding to hear it.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

There were several issues like this at the palmetto regional. ALL the teams and the outstanding head ref handled each case with GP. If the delay possibly affected the outcome of the match, the match was replayed.

Re: Pedestal Delays
 

That's great to hear. Good for you on getting your team excited about the program

Best of luck!