Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

My opinion: Great game, poor execution. You know there are too many issues/rules for referees to pay attention to when a pedestal goes unlighted for twenty seconds (what happened to my team in quals). There are ~6 of them - if one of them doesn't notice no blue/red ball on the field for twenty seconds after a goal, something is wrong. And not with the referees. The referees have too many other, non-game-changing fouls to focus on to even bother with stuff that can actually change the outcome of a match, or safety issues.

My $0.02.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

I hope I'm not speaking inappropriately by posting as a referee this past weekend, but while I've lurked around here in my past 9 years volunteering as a ref, this is the first time I've bothered registering to post. Of course my opinions are my own and not representative of anyone at my regional or my fellow referees, etc.

Without turning this into a laundry list of issues, I was surprised at the basic issues of referee location on this year's field. With regards to seeing whether the pedestal lit up, I found that standing by the tablet in front of the gates made it very challenging to see due to the angle and the number of drivers and coaches in between my position and the pedestal. I could step back and turn towards the pedestal, but that took me away from the scoring tablet and the action on the field.

If anyone knows of a proper channel to provide feedback to FIRST and the GDC as a referee, I'd be interested to hear it. I feel like a bit of an odd duck as my experience with FRC is limited to refereeing once a year and watching the occasional live stream on other weeks, and I won't be at St. Louis so I can't find someone there. For what it's worth, every prior year I finish the weekend with the intent to sign up in VIMS as soon as I remember it's open. This year is the first year where I'm more hesitant, and I expect that I'll read the 2015 game rules in detail before I agree to sign up.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

Personally, I feel that the fouls are really inconsistent. I am a human player, and at the Wisconsin Regional I went to, almost every referee did not call the human player reaching fouls. They only started calling it the second day, and even then only one referee was calling it. Also, I don't like that there is only one ball, and only one robot can score at a time. I also don't like the scoring of the game, and having to keep track of all the points from scoring and assists.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

I'd talk to your head ref. You could also reach out to your volunteer coordinator. You're not the first ref I've heard from whose in the hesitant-or-no for next year boat. I'll have reffed some 300 matches by the end of the season, and I don't yet know how I feel about that. I do know, though, that we're risking losing volunteers. I do like things about this game, but that's reason enough for me to dislike it.

As a coach, it's been frustrating. I'm glad the game has gotten better, but to me, Week 1 is as much a part of the game as Week 7. As some wise person said around here somewhere, it's like FIRST identified everything they've been historically bad at or that's caused major challenges, and made it absolutely critical to this year's game. Too much to watch for refs, too much inconsistency for teams, too many points of failure for everyone.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

Too bad there aren't LEDs on the inbound zones that are wired off the same circuits as their respective pedestals.

... Then again if you light the inbound zones, it would make much more sense to just make the rule say that you can't inbound a ball without the inbound zone being lit. Maybe add in something about the entire alliance being able to only inbound 1 ball per instance of their respective inbound zone lights turning on to aid in clearing up confusion, but otherwise you wouldn't really need the pedestal anymore.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

TIL. (And really agree) Remind me at CMP to buy you a beer and pick your brain sometime.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

This game had a lot of potential for strategic play, but penalties neutered it. I'd rather see more consistent rules that allow for harder defense, or see more balls introduced to the field at a time.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

It's a date!

...well, if we win FLR, which looks like it's going to be a brutally hard thing to do, in all the right ways. :D

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

I really appreciate your insight, and the insight of other referees. From what I can gather, it's never easy to be a referee, and this year is even worse. As a student who will be graduating, I look forward to volunteering - HOWEVER, games like this make me hesitant to ever volunteer for refereeing.

I probably should have clarified in my original post - we did take it to the question box, and the referees said none of them even noticed. Your insight does provide more inspiration as to why some balls take 10-30 seconds to get onto the field, though. I really feel for all of you.

As a student whose life has been changed directly by this organization (most of the life-changing events happening in competition), it truly saddens me that years like this discourage the volunteers that make the competitions happen. FIRST was ambitious with this game, and it was a wonderful concept. However, it saddens me that the poor execution and detail in the rules has prevented this game from reaching its potential - and is discouraging wonderful volunteers like you.

In other words, this could be a whole lot of :D but is really a whole lot of :(

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

Not remotely true - 2013 was often ineffective to the point of removing points from your score. Truth be told - that game was phenomenally designed. It was incentivized and scoring was easy. Furthermore the penalty for a miss was effectively 0 so there was no real downside to having teams try to score.

At higher levels some defense started to occur but, as evidenced by the world champs, the optimal alliance involved 3 robots running and gunning.

I might come back to your other points later but it's been a long night.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

Not quite true... Disc shortages did effect gameplay that year. We ran out in a few matches, partially because partners were missing. Of course, this was only very rarely a problem, and we never had to tell partners not to load discs to allow us to score them.

I totally agree that what made 2013 so awesome was in part that everyone was incentivized to score, even if they couldn't do it very well.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

I've always had some nagging doubts about that comparison between FRC and other types of gaming, and a hypothesis to explain those doubts just occurred to me. In a tabletop game, while there might be a diversity of strategies, it's unlikely that those strategies are fundamentally dependent on the execution of a complex task whose successfulness is (as a practical matter) non-deterministic because of a combination of physical randomness (imprecision in control, variability in game pieces and field, etc.), human perception (of the drivers, officials, etc.) and tournament sorting (essentially random in qualifying, but without enough iterations to represent all permutations). The tabletop game is essentially a very complicated set of strategic possibilities with well-defined randomness. An FRC game (or any physical sport) is only reducible to a set of strategies if you also have a way of reliably modeling the effectiveness of strategic execution in an unpredictably random environment. Computer games probably fall somewhere in between, depending on the nature of the simulation.

If those unpredictably random factors are major contributors to the outcome of an FRC tournament (as I suspect is the case), then designing the game on the basis of the straightforwardly predictable components may be insufficient. That's not to say that I disagree with the idea of a using a statistical model of an FRC game for game design purposes, just that for it to have validity, we need to be clear about the limitations of the model.

Better experimental methods might go a long way toward eliminating those limitations, but the feasibility of some possible approaches is rather questionable. For example, we could gather input and output data for robot mechanisms (of the type used in closed-loop feedback control) to get a sense of the ability of robots to physically execute tasks (confounded by operator ability, of course). Or we could record everything spoken in the question box, and code it for rule compliance (subject, of course, to the existence of a canonical interpretation) to assess the quality of officiation and the likelihood of teams obeying the rules.

At the cost of analytical rigour, it's probably reasonably practical for the GDC to get much of the benefit of those formal methods by soliciting the input of people who are intimately familiar with those factors across a spectrum of FRC events and similar competitions, and asking for quantitative estimates of the distribution of variance. If the GDC isn't already doing this, maybe a good first step would be to try it for a selection of past games (for which the outcomes are known), to see if it can improve the predictive power of the models.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

While I haven't been reffing as long as Ryan has, I was at Waterloo, GTR West, and I will be reffing at champs.

Seeing the pedestals is nearly impossible from the tablet locations near the field gates. The only way I could tell that a pedestal was unlit was when I was tracking that color ball on assists, and noticed that no human player was inbounding after a completed cycle, or when a team began yelling about an unlit pedestal.

Another issue noticed is that depending on the Head ref, the truss lines up exactly at eye level, obstructing the view of dead ball cards for one alliance by the head ref. This meant referees on the other side of the truss had to radio in dead ball cards. Not significant, but with the band aid that the dead ball card is, I dont think the GDC thought about this.

Several penalties are very difficult to enforce correctly.
G40 requires the ref to almost put they're head into the safety zone to see correctly. I don't know about you, but a head in the safety zone seems more dangerous than a human players hand. I understand the rule, but unless its blatant, its very hard to call now. I actually preferred it week 1, much less ambiguous.
G27 needs more defining. What is high speed? What is aggressive ramming? How does any defensive strategy, no matter how gentle not inhibit the other robot? Unless its more defined, the penalties wont be called consistently. The head ref sets the benchmark for each competition, but what ensures the rule is equally applied everywhere? A more thorough definition of these terms would make it a lot more enforceable, and also keep things fair for everyone.
G24 needs a damage clause. If a robot suffers damage causing G24 to be violated, but remain inconsequential to the match, I dont think the penalty should be applied. As the rule is currently written, this is not the case.

I understand that the GDC is unable to predict every twist or turn the season may bring, but having somewhere for Referees to submit feedback would benefit everyone, and lead to a balanced game much more quickly. I was surprised that there was no way to do this besides making suggestions to the head ref.

Tracking very fast paced teams is difficult, especially when there are a few powerhouses on one alliance milking assist points. With the slight delay on the tablets, keeping up with these teams meant that it was very difficult to watch for anything else besides possessions.

The rule change on a Thursday made things difficult as well. At Waterloo, one team played perfectly legal defense on Thursday, and ended up taking huge penalties on Friday for the exact same defense. If the GDC had wanted to stop high speed collisions, why not wait til the following Tuesday.

As a coach, the new rule changes frustrate me, but I can understand where they came from. As a mentor, I feel that anyone who had played a game made by the GDC would have noticed several things before the game was released. I cant blame them for not noticing, and the fact they are doing their best to fix it is evident, I just wish it had been done while teams could still redesign their robots.

Overall I like this game, but as others have stated, its execution is poor, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I will volunteer to ref again, as its a lot of fun, gives a different perspective on the game, and I think whatever they throw at us next year will be a lot easier to ref than this.

PS: Woah, that turned into a wall of text really fast.

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

The game *could* be fun...if the people responsible for game management were all...

1. consistent
2. competently aware of the rules
3. attentive
4. in possession of sufficient visual acuity to discern things that are happening directly in front of them

In other words, Canadian.

And can we PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE aggressively signal pinning counts (provided you even bother to start counting) like they do in Canada?

In all seriousness, it seems Canadian referee crews are generally praised for their performance. Can anyone corroborate this? If true, I openly wonder what their methods of recruiting, training, and preparation are, and I would like to question why the practices of better-performing crews aren't propagated/mandated by the governing body to other regions where refereeing is less well-regarded.

Here's a thought for HQ - spend some of that stockpiled cash you're sitting on on incentive bonuses for events who grade highly in event quality on post-event feedback surveys distributed to teams. Give RD's and VC's more of an incentive to place resources in the area of quality volunteer recruitment (and then train those individuals using better materials and methods than you currently supply). Also, if event performance is truly horrible, such team surveys would QUICKLY identify events where intervention is warranted (instead of watching the alternative happen - letting years of team abuse at the hands of a certain out of control head ref at a certain regional go by before a very public CD thread finally forced action....)

Even if everything is called straight up legit to the letter of the rules, certain foul situations built into this game can still put a sour taste in the mouth of teams, as Waterloo evidenced.

As far as I could tell, the "Thursday rules" had zero effect in Wisconsin, mainly because I felt an "anything goes" style of gameplay was permitted, especially on Saturday morning.

Refs are supposed to be the "police" of this game. Be overt and passionate in your actions in signaling teams that they are doing wrong. RUTHLESSLY PUNISH THE INEPT AND RECKLESS. Rain down swift justice upon the idiots such that those who actually, you know, "read the manual", can have a chance of success instead of being gutted by frame incursion damage in 3 straight Saturday matches with zero penalties called.

I will say that Week 4 pedestal lighting at Wisconsin seemed very good. So we finally learned how to deal with that major clusterfluge, not that that is any consolation to the teams who played in the earlier weeks. Now let's focus on punishing the guilty and reckless and giving the innocent the freedom to play this game the way it was meant to be played.

Week 4 rant....finis. Let's see what happens Week 5....

Re: Why does everyone hate this game so much?
 

I think that's only really a third of the story.

Scoring frisbees was incentivized well, I agree, but that's also because it de-incentivized the other 2/3 of the game:

a) 2/3 level climbing was severely under-rewarded
b) defense was difficult/heavily penalized (namely through safe zones)

Essentially 2013 became about how quickly and consistently you could score frisbees in the high goal, which is a perfectly valid game. Straight shoot-outs were high-scoring, easy to understand for an observer and easy to referee (see FLL).

I can understand people describing 2013 as 'the best game ever'. It had few issues/controversies. It gave every robot an opportunity to show off. Better robots won out. For the most part, a single match was entertaining to watch. Every game should have these qualities.

But the depth of gameplay was quite shallow. The rules reduced 90% of robots to play one strategy: cycle + 10pt hang.

Aerial Assist is a lot braver. It wants to be dynamic and versatile. It wants more teams to think, talk and coordinate before and during a match (at least more than picking which feeder station to use). It wants to be more like a real team sport. Most teams sports have only one game-piece in play at a time as they cater for both defense and offense. That's what I believe Aerial Assist is trying to do.

There are two veins of criticism: criticism of the intent and criticism of the execution. Ultimate Ascent was executed very well, partially because the intent was simpler to execute. But as a fan of team sports, I personally welcome the direction the GDC are trying to take.