Chief Delphi

Chief Delphi (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/index.php)
-   General Forum (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=16)
-   -   Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent? (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=129156)

themccannman 30-04-2014 01:40

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by JackN (Post 1380774)
I am intrigued by people who say this game has more strategic depth than Ultimate Ascent, mainly because I see the polar opposite when I look at the two games. The difference could come in definition of the word but lets think about this.

Aerial Assist had two viable strategies for alliances to pursue. These played out in the finals with the 1678/1114/1640 alliance vs the 254/469/2848 alliance. One alliance was simply making two passes and scoring to limit the danger of putting a ball in the air and having two inbounds. The other was making two passes and added a truss shot. Outside of those two options you had a one niche strategy of the one pass+truss+score. Now the in match actions of robots were very important, I will agree and each individual robot needed to act on their own and make decisions, but those decisions were seldom more than can I go pass or should I play defense.

Ultimate Ascent went in a very different way. Look at the four Einstein alliances from 2013. I would argue all four of them attempted to do very different things. The 33/469/1519 alliance attacked by using two full court shooters to flood the field with frisbees and then using their floor pickups to sweep up the missed shots, the 1241/1477/610 alliance just effectively ran cycles and played the odds that their opponents would miss more shots doing fancy things, the 1678/148/862 alliance had two defenders and one full court shooter and the 1640/303/3476 alliance attempted to do everything on the field with a 30 pt hang+FCS+cycles. Saying that the game lacked depth or that it was just watching teams running cycles is very reductionist.

I thought Aerial Assist was an ok game that had potential and good moments, but on the whole lacked the variety of some of the better games in FRC history. It was more hated on than it should be, but I would rank it in the bottom half of games that I have participated in (all of them since 2005).

As a member of 1678's scouting/strategy team I can vouch for this. Really the only decision we made in the einstein finals this year was where to put our inbounder, either at the start of our cycle, or after the truss shot. Seeing as we wanted to be able to get the triple assist no matter what while under defense that was too heavy for trussing it was the obvious choice to put 1640 at the start of out cycle so that we already had 2 assists as soon as the ball entered the field.

In 2013 we had much more to consider and we played many different strategies throughout each match. 862 was largely on defense in almost every match as their superior driving ability was most valuable there. However, they also played counter defense to protect 148 while they lined up for the FCS, and even ran cycles on occasion. 148 had to be able to both FCS and run cycles. 1678 had to play defense and counter defense along with 862 to slow down the opposition and to protect 148 lining up for the FCS and also be able to switch off to picking up discs off the floor to either starve our opponents, or to put in discs that 148 had missed. In 2013 each robot played many more unique roles. However that's not to say 2014 didn't have strategic depth, it just didn't have the amount of depth that 2013 had.

This doesn't even consider how many more options you had to consider in 2013 for alliance selection. This year was basically choosing an inbounder/defense, a midfielder, and a finisher that was either an open field or a fender shooter. In 2013 there were countless different options to consider when choosing alliance partners ranging from defense, to FCS, to climbing, to scoring colored discs, to cycler, to ground pick up, etc...

JYang 30-04-2014 02:09

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Link07 (Post 1379328)
Absolutely not

^This.

Quote:

Originally Posted by DCA Fan (Post 1379450)
No.

^And also this.

Vupa 30-04-2014 09:48

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Kyle Stewart (Post 1380656)
As for teams that couldn't possess the ball, I'd like to share an anecdote. In LA, Team 687 had a drivetrain-bot that Team 294 provided a lawn chair for so that they could at least inbound the ball. 687, affectionately dubbed ChairBot, became a crowd favorite and was selected for eliminations. For Vegas, 687 had managed to add a functional inbounding mechanism. We selected them as our second pick because they were really well driven, could do quick inbounds, and were effective defenders. They performed well, sadly being damaged over the course of 6 brutal matches in the semi-finals (3 separate field faults -- one was due to the cameraman punching a ball heading to our human player). We lost the finals in large part due to their broken drive train, but we feel like they played extremely well prior to that event. I still think we made the right choice with 687, and it was just the field faults that put more wear on their drivetrain than it could handle.

Teams also got good at herding or pinning the ball to get assists. If they didn't know about that, it's the job of their stronger alliance partners to inform them of that and help them get those assist points. It's more work, but helps make drivetrain-bots feel included in the competition.

The example given is a wonderful demonstration of a box robot being able to contribute to the game with a few modifications and some quick explanations. I concede that this is perhaps where AA shines in the way that no other game has, allowing box robots to really show off their potential. However, the game is also flawed simply in the way that it restricts the potential of teams that aren't in-bounders, but are not technically capable enough to be a high-level truss shot or finisher. This is the scenario in which you are telling your teammate to avoid picking up the ball and just play defense because you, as an alliance, fear a dead-ball or wasted time. We can see it as restricting the potential of a middle-tier team as their robot is realistically being told to not use the functions they spent weeks designing and building. This scenario is unfortunately repeated time and time again in qualification matches due to teams being unwilling to lose a match due to their alliance partners fumbling the ball. Perhaps an occurrence only seen at the regionals my team attended, it seems that the appearance of only one game piece per alliance has raised viewer-friendliness but at the same time also added restrictions on the other robots playing the game.

In the end, I still believe that Ultimate Ascent was better than Aerial Assist simply because of the fact that UA was much more versatile than AA. This can be seen in the different number of strategies that teams could go through involving different core fundamentals in robot design. (climbers, full court shooters, and cyclers, along with a host of designs in between). AA basically has one superior strategy of the triple assist in which robots all fell into and created designs with varying degrees of success for that one strategy. And although I admit that in the pure essence of AA, it was a good game due to its spectator-friendliness and attempts to promote teamwork, it falls flat in many aspects because of this lack of versatility.

Lil' Lavery 30-04-2014 10:34

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Perhaps there should be a distinction made between "strategy" and "tactics." While the "strategic" meta-game of highly competitive matches settled into 50-point cycles with trussing to the human player, that glosses over a lot of the finer detail tactical differences between alliances. The amount of robot-robot interaction, both in terms of assists/offense and defense was greater than any game in memory (even 2007 and 2009), and it led to a great deal of robot-specific tactical decisions, many of which evolved late in the season.

For instance, look at how assists were gathered. While the default method was one robot would pick up the ball and spit it out on the ground towards another, there was plenty of variance from that. "Kiss passing" was popular from essentially the beginning of the season, but not every robot could accomplish that easily (especially if your intake had to stick out dramatically to accumulate or release a ball). A number of robots had specific methods for passing to each other, like arm bots dropping a ball directly into an open hopper or what amounted to hand-off between bots with comptabale gripping mechanisms. Late in the season a new method emerged; consisting of quickly passing the ball back to the human player immediately after an inbound, and having that human player throw it to a second robot. This was used plenty during qualifications at MAR champs (as far as I can tell 1089 was the first team to use this), but really gained popularity in St. Louis, to the point where two different Einstein alliances (2590 with Archimedes and 973 with Galileo) used this method to rapidly register an assist without much risk of losing a ball.

You can find similar distinctions defensively, as well. 1712 developed different methods of harassing various inbounders, based on their machine's design. If a team didn't establish firm control of a ball during an inbound, we knew that a well-timed impact could knock the ball loose before they registered a possession. Others we opted to keep away from the inbounding position, since it was difficult to load them at range. Team 2590 could use their arm to disrupt pass-through inbounding and kiss pass attempts. Team 118 used their height to disrupt 254 from being able to score. 1625's swerve (tank?) and drive team were able to punish 33 for their drivetrain selection during the Archimedes finals.

There are plenty of examples of robot-specific match-up that opened new tactical options in this game, plenty more than I've seen in most recent games. Ultimate Ascent was pretty much limited to blocking lower release point full court shooters (or a rare attempt at blocking pyramid shooters), otherwise was limited to pushing matches and parallel play. You didn't really tailor your tactical decisions based on machine characteristics, beyond how many discs a team could score.

Cam877 30-04-2014 12:13

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
This is a very controversial question everywhere in FIRST right now, and I have to say Aerial Assist really stole my heart by the end of the season. In the beginning, I wasn't too sure, for my team had a rough first event, with the qualifications filled with non-working robots and our elims campaign hindered by fouls. However, as the season went on, and I went to MAR Championships and then FIRST Champs, I realized that this game is astronomically better than ultimate ascent. As the competition got better and the strategies got deeper, the elimination matches and qualification matches alike became more and more exciting. The excitement of the elimination matches, however, simply cannot be matched by any previous game. After last year, I said to myself, "How could FIRST ever hope to make a better game than that?" And this year, I was blown off my feet by the sheer greatness of this game. And now, I find myself in the same position again, wondering how FIRST will be able to come up with a game even close to the greatness of aerial assist. And judging by FIRST's game making skills of late, I have no doubt that I will be pleasantly surprised again come next year.

AA > UA!!!

Citrus Dad 30-04-2014 13:08

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by BarryCurcio (Post 1380442)
I thought Aerial Assist was better, there was much more teamwork involved with the actual game and one of the main objectives is to demonstrate teamwork and "Gracious Professionalism". I did see a previous comment questioning strategies but honestly depending on our alliance partner we were required to change our strategies on more than one occasion. I thought one active ball on the field was a great idea because if a robot had trouble getting it off of the field it was interesting to see how alliance partners helped.

Our drive coach wasn't so happy about the game, but he had it figured out from the start.

I think if you want to see what the GDC intended, look at 1678's matches 51 and 135 in Newton. We seemed to have an inordinate number of rookies with us, but we took that as challenge that turned out to be quite fun. In those two matches we were projected to lose, but we worked with those rookie teams and worked out game strategies that highlighted their abilities and strengths. In at least two cases, those rookie teams had much stronger teams that benefited their other alliance partners as well (including making the race with 1114 a nail biter). 5310 went from being 2-10 at 2 regionals to 5-5 in Newton.

In last year's game, I'm not sure that we would have devoted the same amount of resources to those teams, but I expect now we'll raise the level of our outreach no matter what the future game is. The reward was huge from the satisfaction--probably greater than any other accomplishment we had last weekend.:D

Citrus Dad 30-04-2014 13:18

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Vupa (Post 1380906)
However, the game is also flawed simply in the way that it restricts the potential of teams that aren't in-bounders, but are not technically capable enough to be a high-level truss shot or finisher. This is the scenario in which you are telling your teammate to avoid picking up the ball and just play defense because you, as an alliance, fear a dead-ball or wasted time. We can see it as restricting the potential of a middle-tier team as their robot is realistically being told to not use the functions they spent weeks designing and building. This scenario is unfortunately repeated time and time again in qualification matches due to teams being unwilling to lose a match due to their alliance partners fumbling the ball. Perhaps an occurrence only seen at the regionals my team attended, it seems that the appearance of only one game piece per alliance has raised viewer-friendliness but at the same time also added restrictions on the other robots playing the game

I think much of this problem can be avoided by a simple solution I suggested elsewhere--that the GDC announce in September whether the game will require interaction among the robots on the field. The stronger teams will then reach out to the midlevel and rookie teams to help design robots, and everyone will know that they need to design for specific roles, not to accomplish every single task. In fact, this may allow the GDC to develop more complex games with even more tasks since no one robot will be expected to accomplish them all. Certainly, we saw in UA that no robot was completely successful at everything, and only a few could even attempt them all, because the combination was too difficult to reach in 6 weeks.

notmattlythgoe 01-05-2014 12:25

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad (Post 1380984)
I think much of this problem can be avoided by a simple solution I suggested elsewhere--that the GDC announce in September whether the game will require interaction among the robots on the field. The stronger teams will then reach out to the midlevel and rookie teams to help design robots, and everyone will know that they need to design for specific roles, not to accomplish every single task. In fact, this may allow the GDC to develop more complex games with even more tasks since no one robot will be expected to accomplish them all. Certainly, we saw in UA that no robot was completely successful at everything, and only a few could even attempt them all, because the combination was too difficult to reach in 6 weeks.

I honestly don't think this would effect anything. Knowing in September that the game is going to be cooperative, but not knowing what the game is doesn't help anyone. You'll still have the top teams designing to be able to complete all of the tasks, and you'll still have the bottom robots not able to complete the tasks without assistance.

Citrus Dad 01-05-2014 13:03

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe (Post 1381510)
I honestly don't think this would effect anything. Knowing in September that the game is going to be cooperative, but not knowing what the game is doesn't help anyone. You'll still have the top teams designing to be able to complete all of the tasks, and you'll still have the bottom robots not able to complete the tasks without assistance.

The point is that the top teams, which too often have ignored the less strong teams, now will have a much stronger incentive to help those teams, even during the build season. We were caught by surprise, but hadn't allocated enough resources to go to other teams yet. We won't have that problem next year.

Rather than starting over, here's a thread where this is discussed much more extensively: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=128301.

Abhishek R 01-05-2014 13:15

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad (Post 1381524)
The point is that the top teams, which too often have ignored the less strong teams, now will have a much stronger incentive to help those teams, even during the build season. We were caught by surprise, but hadn't allocated enough resources to go to other teams yet. We won't have that problem next year.

Rather than starting over, here's a thread where this is discussed much more extensively: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=128301.

Barring problems such as ease of assistance, proximity, resources available, and other things that prevent a veteran team from helping other teams... I don't think any noticeable change would be seen. Teams that actively try and help others in their area will continue to do so and teams that don't have the time or manpower won't be able to. We shouldn't need an incentive.

Siri 01-05-2014 15:14

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery (Post 1380920)
...Late in the season a new method emerged; consisting of quickly passing the ball back to the human player immediately after an inbound, and having that human player throw it to a second robot. This was used plenty during qualifications at MAR champs (as far as I can tell 1089 was the first team to use this), but really gained popularity in St. Louis, to the point where two different Einstein alliances (2590 with Archimedes and 973 with Galileo) used this method to rapidly register an assist without much risk of losing a ball.

You can find similar distinctions defensively, as well. 1712 developed different methods of harassing various inbounders, based on their machine's design. If a team didn't establish firm control of a ball during an inbound, we knew that a well-timed impact could knock the ball loose before they registered a possession. Others we opted to keep away from the inbounding position, since it was difficult to load them at range. Team 2590 could use their arm to disrupt pass-through inbounding and kiss pass attempts. Team 118 used their height to disrupt 254 from being able to score. 1625's swerve (tank?) and drive team were able to punish 33 for their drivetrain selection during the Archimedes finals.

There are plenty of examples of robot-specific match-up that opened new tactical options in this game, plenty more than I've seen in most recent games. Ultimate Ascent was pretty much limited to blocking lower release point full court shooters (or a rare attempt at blocking pyramid shooters), otherwise was limited to pushing matches and parallel play. You didn't really tailor your tactical decisions based on machine characteristics, beyond how many discs a team could score.

Sean, I don't disagree with your list of tactics. (Well, except bouncebacks and wall balls weren't a late-season development; at least for us they just were net negative until D got really good.) But I disagree that UA didn't have such tactical moves. I remember learning how/when to hit different robots to force misses or jams, pressure into them their pyramid, or interrupt unprotected loading. There was blocking the LZ based on drivetrain, forcing susceptible traffic through a 'mine field' on upside-down discs (which was also an issue working with allies), knowing how and when to risk pyramid defense or through-traffic, bogging down an LZ cycler to screw up a full court ally... not to mention just managing your own alliances traffic to keep routes as fast and robust as possible. In fact, guiding ally and opposing traffic was arguably more critical in UA than AA, since the 'routes' were more defined and particular. We needed to know exactly how long to hold an opponent to force the largest point differential, both in terms of cycle time vs match time and in changing up traffic patterns. This stuff is huge, and it's huge every year; it's just the logistics that vary.

Citrus Dad 01-05-2014 19:41

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Abhishek R (Post 1381530)
Barring problems such as ease of assistance, proximity, resources available, and other things that prevent a veteran team from helping other teams... I don't think any noticeable change would be seen. Teams that actively try and help others in their area will continue to do so and teams that don't have the time or manpower won't be able to. We shouldn't need an incentive.

See the other thread. Incentives do work--I can assure you as a professional economist. If you know something more is at stake, you'll change your priorities. I don't want to rehash everything I said in the other thread because there's extensive discussion about how this would change team's behaviors and why.

Siri 01-05-2014 20:40

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad (Post 1381674)
See the other thread. Incentives do work--I can assure you as a professional economist. If you know something more is at stake, you'll change your priorities. I don't want to rehash everything I said in the other thread because there's extensive discussion about how this would change team's behaviors and why.

I think the argument is that the only teams who see something as being at stake (the only ones you're incentivizing) are those in the high-preforming cohort that's already most likely to be helping the community. Teams in other situations will continue (ostensibly) to benefit more from directing their efforts elsewhere, vis-a-vis the the precieved step improvement in performance that results from helping other teams.

I don't know that I agree with the attempted ubiquity of the generalization, but I do agree that the cohort whose behavior might be affected by this incentive is not over-large.

Citrus Dad 02-05-2014 14:57

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Siri (Post 1381682)
I think the argument is that the only teams who see something as being at stake (the only ones you're incentivizing) are those in the high-preforming cohort that's already most likely to be helping the community. Teams in other situations will continue (ostensibly) to benefit more from directing their efforts elsewhere, vis-a-vis the the precieved step improvement in performance that results from helping other teams.

I don't know that I agree with the attempted ubiquity of the generalization, but I do agree that the cohort whose behavior might be affected by this incentive is not over-large.

I think that mid-level teams would have a stronger incentive--my observation is that they were the ones most hurt by weak alliance members, that they were most likely to suffer from the loss of the third 20 point assist. The better teams could simply ramp up their cycle times in most qualifying matches to pull it out, and usually were more adaptive to game tactics.

I also think by making an announcement, this makes the incentive and the expected action by these teams more explicit. Up to now those mid level teams could quietly sit in their bubbles and not be too worried about the consequences. In the new world, FIRST would be saying that your past inaction will now have consequences.

In addition, the better teams might be more likely to set up regional efforts that spill over to the mid-level teams and raises everyone's game as a result.

As it is now, there are no real incentives for preseason cooperation other than Chairman's or EI. Sorry, but relying solely on voluntary actions to achieve an organizational goal is almost always a fruitless path (and there's much in the economics literature to back this up.)

notmattlythgoe 02-05-2014 15:03

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad (Post 1382023)
I think that mid-level teams would have a stronger incentive--my observation is that they were the ones most hurt by weak alliance members, that they were most likely to suffer from the loss of the third 20 point assist. The better teams could simply ramp up their cycle times in most qualifying matches to pull it out, and usually were more adaptive to game tactics.

I also think by making an announcement, this makes the incentive and the expected action by these teams more explicit. Up to now those mid level teams could quietly sit in their bubbles and not be too worried about the consequences. In the new world, FIRST would be saying that your past inaction will now have consequences.

In addition, the better teams might be more likely to set up regional efforts that spill over to the mid-level teams and raises everyone's game as a result.

As it is now, there are no real incentives for preseason cooperation other than Chairman's or EI. Sorry, but relying solely on voluntary actions to achieve an organizational goal is almost always a fruitless path (and there's much in the economics literature to back this up.)

Is the incentive of over all better play at regionals not incentive enough for teams to help the teams around them? There are plenty of incentives already, I don't think telling teams in September that the game is going to require cooperation is really going to increase that incentive, not knowing how the game is going to be cooperative hinders the help you can provide. Nobody wants to waste the resources to help a team develop a drivetrain just to find out that the drivetrain is useless come build season because of some obstacle that the game involves.

allen.mays 02-05-2014 15:23

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Vupa (Post 1380906)
However, the game is also flawed simply in the way that it restricts the potential of teams that aren't in-bounders, but are not technically capable enough to be a high-level truss shot or finisher..

I am not trying to be antagonistic, but essentially you are saying that a robot that is not very good at performing the tasks of the game should have more opportunity to prove itself?! It's kind of like saying I can't throw well, catch well, or hit well, but I deserve a tryout for the MLB.

In Ultimate Ascent, our fledgling team was sometimes told to "stay out of the way and we will win" by more experienced teams. A team - typically a well-resourced veteran team - could design a scoring machine and forget that anyone else was even on the field. For Aerial Assist, the emphasis on passing points forced top-level teams to find ways to incorporate lesser robots into the match. While this year we felt the frustration of having an overall well-designed concept that did not advance, I fully understand the reasons why. As with any competition, if you are not THE talent, then you better at least have something significant to contribute.

Overall, this year's game raised the floor without lowering the ceiling.

iggy_gim 02-05-2014 16:05

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
I am 100% in agreement!
For the same reasons as everyone else said: strategy and teamwork. But not only that, but it was a more "rookie" friendly game and could be pulled off with a lack of complex engineering that I found Ultimate Ascent required. At my regionals, a team did nothing but inbound the ball and they ended up in the top fifteen qualification seed! Furthermore, from a spectator perspective, Arial Assist was much easier to follow and resembled more of a sport than a menial task.

Henrique Schmit 02-05-2014 18:17

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Aerial Assist is a bad game with a good concept, Ultimate Ascent was a good game with a "bad concept". I believe that Ultimate Ascent had a very good challenge and a good number of choices regarding the challenges you choose to complete, even weaker teams could go for the low goal as a way to help their alliance . Like Rebound Rumble, Ultimate Ascent is a very developed game, but every robot plays it's own game, with way less interaction between alliances and inside alliances, like people already said, it was a solo mission, yet a good solo mission, that could be fun to watch at lower levels too. Aerial Assist introduced a new way of playing first games, where there is a good level of interaction required between and inside the alliances, this created a new level of strategy behind the gameplay. Aerial Assist also had the goalie zones, which created a very high level of autonomous gameplay, especially at Einstein. Sure, you can say that for every goalie that worked well there were 10 that ended up doing nothing, but that just depends on the mentality of the teams, there will always be teams that design their robot around an idea that doesn't work, so i'm pro goalie zones. Another thing that i liked very much is the idea that the score goes up in leaps, which makes the game much more interesting to watch, because the crowd accumulates a lot of excitement for when the ball is scored, like in football (soccer). Don't get me wrong i do think that only one game object per alliance always leaves 2 teams to find something else to do, and this gets us to the bad part of Aerial Assist. This is a game that, right from the start, felt empty, like a recycled game, it is missing an end game and it has a very small set of variations for your robot to have, i feel like the field is too open which normally leaves all the robots in the middle of the field, just pushing each other, that's not really fun to watch. Aerial Assist was designed too much around the idea that all robots will be able to play their roles at a high level, which made the qualification matches and earlier regionals extremely boring to watch, yet made the elimination rounds at the Championships some of the best games ever seen in FRC. Aerial Assist also has a very undeveloped set of rules, like G40, it is a penalty big enough to easily change the result of a game, just because the human player can't get close to the robot, i believe human players know when they are too close to the robots, this rule should be changed to give them more space ( for example, only giving the penalty if they extend their arms inside the field) and still impeding unsafe contact with the robot ( for example giving the penalty for direct or indirect contact with the robot). There are other rules with failures, but my point is that Aerial Assist introduced a new kind of game, that has a potential to create very interesting games and it also involves more of the FIRST spirit in the challenge, and that's why i believe having this game, was not wasting a year of FRC, but it is the first game of what i hope to be the new kind of FRC games(or maybe we could just switch to water games since everyone knows they are inevitable), so it is still undeveloped and i believe that the next games will fix that.

Just my 2 cents ( sorry if i offended anyone)

Pault 02-05-2014 22:17

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
For all the people that claim Arial Assist raised the floor:

The floor did not have better robots this year. They were just rewarded more for doing less. I would not call that raising the floor. In fact, it actually lowers it in some senses, because:

a) Teams were encouraged not to use some of their more sophisticated mechanisms because they weren't reliable enough

b) If this type of game continues, teams will start to realize that they should not strive for lofty goals, and instead simply grab the low hanging fruit and get tons of driver practice. I know my team had a lot of people who really pushed to have a defense/assist robot, even though we were fairly confident in our ability to build a shooter. This limits teams and doesn't really help FRC get more competitive.

Now, don't misunderstand me and think that I want the lower tier robots to be unable to score points. It's critical that they are able to feel important to their alliance. But we need to make sure that we are always incentivising teams to go for more difficult strategies, instead of making it so that only 1 robot (usually) can be the finisher and 1 robot (usually) has to be a dedicated inbounder/defender that never shoots the ball.

notmattlythgoe 03-05-2014 09:42

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

a) Teams were encouraged not to use some of their more sophisticated mechanisms because they weren't reliable enough

b) If this type of game continues, teams will start to realize that they should not strive for lofty goals, and instead simply grab the low hanging fruit and get tons of driver practice. I know my team had a lot of people who really pushed to have a defense/assist robot, even though we were fairly confident in our ability to build a shooter. This limits teams and doesn't really help FRC get more competitive.
I honestly don't see how this is different than any other year. If your complicated mechanism isn't reliable you aren't going to want to use it any year. Last year teams built climbers and only focused on that phase of the game, did they only reach for the low hanging fruit then? Every year the bane of some of the lower tier teams is reaching too high when they don't have the resources to succeed at it.

Abhishek R 03-05-2014 11:18

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe (Post 1382268)
I honestly don't see how this is different than any other year. If your complicated mechanism isn't reliable you aren't going to want to use it any year. Last year teams built climbers and only focused on that phase of the game, did they only reach for the low hanging fruit then? Every year the bane of some of the lower tier teams is reaching too high when they don't have the resources to succeed at it.

I think he means that in years like 2013, their actions didn't really affect others on the alliance as much compared to 2014.

Citrus Dad 03-05-2014 21:57

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 
Quote:

Originally Posted by Pault (Post 1382173)
For all the people that claim Arial Assist raised the floor:

The floor did not have better robots this year. They were just rewarded more for doing less. I would not call that raising the floor. In fact, it actually lowers it in some senses, because:

a) Teams were encouraged not to use some of their more sophisticated mechanisms because they weren't reliable enough

b) If this type of game continues, teams will start to realize that they should not strive for lofty goals, and instead simply grab the low hanging fruit and get tons of driver practice. I know my team had a lot of people who really pushed to have a defense/assist robot, even though we were fairly confident in our ability to build a shooter. This limits teams and doesn't really help FRC get more competitive.

Now, don't misunderstand me and think that I want the lower tier robots to be unable to score points. It's critical that they are able to feel important to their alliance. But we need to make sure that we are always incentivising teams to go for more difficult strategies, instead of making it so that only 1 robot (usually) can be the finisher and 1 robot (usually) has to be a dedicated inbounder/defender that never shoots the ball.

Young teams are like young children--you don't start them out trying to solve algebra equations, even if they want to. They have start out with being proficient at addition and subtraction. Rewarding them with success for gaining that proficiency gives them a stronger incentive to reach for the next level.

All of the rookie teams we helped in St. Louis outperformed their expectations. We hope that gives them the boost to build even better robots next year.


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 06:05.

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2017, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright © Chief Delphi