Originally Posted by Anupam Goli (Post 1463417)

Another year, another Peachtree Regional is done. This region is sending a grand total of 11 teams to championships, with winners of previous competitions, and Peachtree's winners, RAS, RCA, and EI award winners. That's a solid representation of southern USA teams at the championships.

Anyway, i wanted to share some thoughts and give some shoutouts for peachtree. First, some positive thoughts:

The second iteration of GameTime was even better than before, with some nice talks on strategic design, match and game strategy, and insights into gameplay. I'm hoping GameTime returns again.

The competition this year was great. This year's regional was deeper than it has been ever. Most teams that made eliminations had already played once before. Clearly, having 2 events in Georgia is making a difference in the level of play as the season goes on.

The full size practice field is one of those things that makes GA events great too. Other regionals can't provide more than a half of the field to practice on, and yet we have a full size field with most of the game pieces.

Now, let's go onto some things that I didn't particularly like:

The pit space. Our individual pits were fine, but with a size of venue we had, why were all of the pits crammed into one corner? FIRST hosted 2 divisions + FLL and FTC pits in the size of venue we had (that's 200+teams). There was no reason to have essentially, the same overall pit space as the 42-team Southern Classic regional, and crowd 66 teams into that space when we have a venue that can handle much more. Southern Classic's venue was much smaller, yet much more comfortable. I felt crowded whenever i went from the stands to the pits.

The stands. The stands were pretty unimpressive. they were far from the field and were really low. The stands at southern classic were so much better. We need high risers for scouting and getting a good view of the action.

The pit announcer was kind of annoying with his "robot robot" spiel, though it might have been because we were near the speaker. It got so bad that our pit mentor mandated the students to wear earplugs in the pit.

Also I realize we were wayyy of schedule thanks to Dean giving us an inspirational speech, but having only a 20 minute lunch break before we had to queue up in eliminations left us almost no time to even formulate a strategy and get a game plan in mind. Also, only 8 matches per team in quals was kind of a downer too, especially to teams who can only go to 1 event every year. Maybe our venue can handle 66 teams, but if our staff can't put 9 matches + per team, it may not be worth it to go above 60 teams.

Anyway, let's not bog down on the negatives too much. I want to give some shoutouts to:

4468: Your team has grown so much in the last 2 years, and it's great to see you guys finally make it not only to the eliminations, but to move onto the finals. I'm so glad you will be coming to worlds. I'm hoping we'll be in the same subdivision! Well deserved finalist medal and EI!

4509 We ended up on the same alliance together again, but we got knocked out in quarters again. Your teams designs are always creative and unique, and continue to inspire me. Hopefully we can figure out the voodoo preventing us from advancing in elims next year.

Anyways, we may see you again next year at Peachtree!

Originally Posted by Anupam Goli (Post 1463417)

Another year, another Peachtree Regional is done. This region is sending a grand total of 11 teams to championships, with winners of previous competitions, and Peachtree's winners, RAS, RCA, and EI award winners. That's a solid representation of southern USA teams at the championships.

Anyway, i wanted to share some thoughts and give some shoutouts for peachtree. First, some positive thoughts:

The second iteration of GameTime was even better than before, with some nice talks on strategic design, match and game strategy, and insights into gameplay. I'm hoping GameTime returns again.

The competition this year was great. This year's regional was deeper than it has been ever. Most teams that made eliminations had already played once before. Clearly, having 2 events in Georgia is making a difference in the level of play as the season goes on.

The full size practice field is one of those things that makes GA events great too. Other regionals can't provide more than a half of the field to practice on, and yet we have a full size field with most of the game pieces.

Now, let's go onto some things that I didn't particularly like:

The pit space. Our individual pits were fine, but with a size of venue we had, why were all of the pits crammed into one corner? FIRST hosted 2 divisions + FLL and FTC pits in the size of venue we had (that's 200+teams). There was no reason to have essentially, the same overall pit space as the 42-team Southern Classic regional, and crowd 66 teams into that space when we have a venue that can handle much more. Southern Classic's venue was much smaller, yet much more comfortable. I felt crowded whenever i went from the stands to the pits.

The stands. The stands were pretty unimpressive. they were far from the field and were really low. The stands at southern classic were so much better. We need high risers for scouting and getting a good view of the action.

The pit announcer was kind of annoying with his "robot robot" spiel, though it might have been because we were near the speaker. It got so bad that our pit mentor mandated the students to wear earplugs in the pit.

Also I realize we were wayyy of schedule thanks to Dean giving us an inspirational speech, but having only a 20 minute lunch break before we had to queue up in eliminations left us almost no time to even formulate a strategy and get a game plan in mind. Also, only 8 matches per team in quals was kind of a downer too, especially to teams who can only go to 1 event every year. Maybe our venue can handle 66 teams, but if our staff can't put 9 matches + per team, it may not be worth it to go above 60 teams.

Anyway, let's not bog down on the negatives too much. I want to give some shoutouts to:

4468: Your team has grown so much in the last 2 years, and it's great to see you guys finally make it not only to the eliminations, but to move onto the finals. I'm so glad you will be coming to worlds. I'm hoping we'll be in the same subdivision! Well deserved finalist medal and EI!

4509 We ended up on the same alliance together again, but we got knocked out in quarters again. Your teams designs are always creative and unique, and continue to inspire me. Hopefully we can figure out the voodoo preventing us from advancing in elims next year.

Anyways, we may see you again next year at Peachtree!

Originally Posted by rspurlin (Post 1463545)

Let me start by agreeing with the previous comments on the negatives.

I was not happy to arrive on Wednesday for field setup and find the seating so far from the field and so little rake. As a planning committee we have input on layout and other issues, but not final control. Sometimes there are also issues such as power, floor access points, hanging or rigging points or other considerations that have to be taken into account as well. Unfortunately if the bleachers can't be set up right the first time, there's no way to rearrange them at the last minute. We will try to do better in future years.

As for giving every team 9 or more matches, that would be wonderful. We'd just need to make it a four day event and find lots of new volunteers (I took 2.5 days of my vacation time to help run this event, so while I'll gladly give you another day of my vacation,I'm not sure all volunteers can do that). The math breaks down this way: With 66 teams you need to run 11 matches (66/6) for each team to play one. Multiply that by 8 or 9 to yield 88 or 99 qualification matches. Cycle time is the time between the start of one match to the next and has to include the match itself, finalizing the scoring, getting the robots off the field, then getting new robots on the field and getting them linked up and ready to play. With this year's game, it's pretty hard to do that in 6 minutes and probably impossible to sustain that match after match. So if you assume a 7 minute cycle, 88 matches requires 616 minutes and 99 matches requires 693. With 11 hours (660 minutes) allocated in a FIRST three day event to qualifications, you can see why you had 8 matches. one other consideration is that you know there will be a team or teams that has trouble linking with the field; for every minute you hold the match waiting for linkup, you have to run that number of matches one minute faster than your target cycle time to catch up. Or to put it another way, we can stay on schedule by bypassing you if you're not ready at the 7 minute mark, or we can give you every effort we can for you to run your robot and be late. We chose the latter over the former and I'd really like to know if you think we made the wrong choice.

Now let's run the same math for the Georgia Southern Classic regional in Perry: 42 teams means you need 7 matches for every team to play one. Knowing it was a week one regional with a new control system, we targeted 8 minute cycles and still had time enough to give every team 11 matches (77 total requiring 616 minutes). We were never more than 10 minutes behind schedule and finished each segment within 2 minutes of target.

I like everything to run on schedule too, but when it isn't happening, we need to remember we are still in this together.

Originally Posted by Anupam Goli (Post 1463554)

Ray,

I agree with you on all fronts. The staff and volunteers did their best to get back on schedule after all of the delays, and I wholeheartedly appreciate their efforts to do so. Looking at the cost of fielding a robot though, I'm not sure if I agree that running 8 matches per team is the way we should proceed. I know the vision of GA FIRST is to get as many teams into FRC as possible, but we may need to step back and think about the experience.

If we count our team's sponsorship pledge that covers our registration, we still pay $4000 for a 2nd regional entrance, $3500 for a robot, $3500 for a practice robot in our case, U-haul rental service, and transport to the event. We're sinking in $11,000 + for the regional season. We played 11 + 8 = 19 quals matches in our 2 regionals. That comes out to about $578 per match for us. If we only did one event (Peachtree), we'd be paying $8000+ for 8 quals matches, $1000 per match. Many other teams don't put in the money we do into the program, and others don't have the sponsors we do. If we assume $5000 + $4000 for the registration and robot cost, teams are paying $1,111 per match. I think sinking that type of money and only fielding your robot 8 times isn't worth it.

I think we need to re-evaluate the experience we give teams, and maybe go away from 60+teams at an event. Even if we go down to 60 teams, we can run the same number of qualification matches, giving 48 teams an additional qualification match. If we go down to 58 teams at the event, every team is guaranteed 9 matches in quals, running on the same schedule we had this year. I don't know how we can make this happen, but maybe restricting the initial capacity to 54 during registration gives room for 4 rookies/exceptions to be added in at the last minute.

Mulling things in my head, it may finally be time for our state to go to districts.

Originally Posted by MooreteP (Post 1463603)

Go to Districts.

Originally Posted by Gene F (Post 1463643)

Second a shout out to team 4188, Columbus Space Program for picking us to join their alliance and also to team 108, The Sigma C@ts for rounding out our alliance. The consistency you both showed in the playoffs was amazing! Though we were the ones topping the stacks of 6 you guys set us up. Can't wait to see you both at Championships!