Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.)

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.

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.

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)

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.

Re: Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?
 

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.