Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

While my team had a great season, and had a ton of fun, this is my least favorite game. I think, unintentionally, it does the opposite of what FIRST tries to do. What I mean is, FIRST wants robotics to be thought of as important as a sport, and that is why sports inspired games do so well, because it gets the crowd going, and can pull attention from all kinds of people who would not normally be excited about robots. With no defense, you take away a lot of the strategy in the game, and excitement. Also, rookie teams often could/would build defensive bots and be able to be competitive, teams can build a purely defensive bot and be an asset to their alliance. If you can't stack in this game, you are in the way and a liability for your alliance.

Also, hard to explain, but after a 3-regional season, I do think it is not as exciting for spectators, and it changes the way teams watch the games. In the past, teams would cheer on an alliance, with the win-loss system for ranking. Now, this year, I found a lot of teams/members cheering for low scores all around, because that helps your rank. This is not GP, and seems to take out alot of the spirit of traditional FIRST games.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

I guess my biggest complaint about this game is just what your first mentor liked about it. Sports are popular. There's a very good reason professional athletes get paid astronomically high salaries. There's also a very good reason why little kids grow up saying I want to be a professional baseball/soccer/football etc. player. It's because sports are popular. I want little kids to be saying: "I want to grow up to be a(n) engineer/welder/architect". I'm sure that's something everybody on CD can agree on, which is a rare thing. I want the reason for them to grow up saying this thing because FIRST has accomplished it's mission of bringing STEM to the popular culture. I just believe that a sports-like-game does a better job of this.

Is there a reason teams still use their 2012 robot when doing showcase events in big arenas, specifically at basketball games? Could it be because the purpose of the robot is instantly recognizable by anybody within a matter of seconds? Now the important question: Will teams be able to showcase their Recycle Rush robot in front of large crowds with as much, or more success than they could with their 2012 robot? I severely doubt that they can.

So in order to infiltrate the popular culture it is my strong belief that FIRST needs to emulate the games which people already know and love.

On the other hand... I completely understand the purpose of Recycle Rush. We can't do the same thing (throw objects into goals) every year. We need to mix it up. With that said, there are so many different recognizable sports out there which can be emulated in a way that they do provide a unique engineering challenge, and a different viewing experience for the crowd.

Edit: A lot of the same sentiment ^^^ I was sniped.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

As lead strategist/scout mentor I thoroughly enjoyed this years game. From those standpoints.

We failed to make worlds but still rank in top 16.5% world rank. 20% of teams go to Worlds.

Our failing was not having a bot to be top 8 and alliance captain, that is not say we did not have a shot with our outstanding alliance partners with four outstanding teams ( in our two playoff alliances) gave us a total shot and winning we are grateful for the support of teams 696 Circuit Breakers, 1836 Milken Knights, 3021 The Agency and 1772 Brazilian Trailblazers...all of you were excellent alliance captains and/or partners . Our strategy was sound "dividing labor" to what each bot adds, however the fact we were not good enough to be an alliance captain (Highest rank #15) meant we came close but failed. So many chances to succeed. Yet did not.

Lesson learned.

What I do like is this challenge:

A. Requires engineering
B. Requires alliance teamwork and proper makeup
C. Requires consistency
D. Requires considering every scoring aspect

No two best bots in the arena can win on their own guaranteed. The best three matched perfectly wins.

Two examples from our own regionals....

In Ventura best bot/team hands down 330 Beach Bots second best 1717 D'Penguineers along with 2761 Iron Horse (strong third)..they eventually won BUT they were a measly 6 points in three semi finals QA from not even making the finals. We could have beat them (696, 1836, 5137) had any one play in three games made us 6+ points ... 6 points extra in three games and who knows we could be in the worlds....its that close.

In San Diego best bot was 1538 Holy Cows and second best obviously was Code Orange 3476 they added a strong third pick 4486 Blue Prints ...They formed a very strong alliance lost in the finals by 1 point in second final match (0-2 in finals)...same thing happened to Holy Cows in their first regional...dominated added second best strong third and then lost . Best two bots plus third strong (dual grabber) does not guarantee a championship. Like in previous years where a strong two or one could win. I think noodles won San Diego. I was shocked I thought they won and there would be a game 3 there wasn't ...great effort from a great alliance.

With best two bots from a scout standpoint and their third was a fast platform side two wall RC grabber to go along with Holy Cows super fast two RC wall grabber...their potential to grab all four cans in auto.... they lost... Two best bots + dual can grabber seems like they should win.

As a hearty side note congrats to both Eagle Robotics 399 (only one set of fast dual RC talons ) and 3255 SuperNURDS who I consider great teams and FRC friends and of course 2339 Robolopes! Amazing alliance winning against all odds.

Special shout out to the Greybots and Adam Heard thanks for your teams full support!

Moral of the story...having the best two bots does not guarantee success in this years game... the differential in the top 4 alliances is minuscule from a scouting perspective... I love that aspect of this years game.

May the best alliance makeup win the worlds, going to be very interesting. I will watch the playoffs.

I fully support what they were trying to do with RR...its a great challenge.

Best of luck to all teams who made it...worlds are going to be amazing and tough...good luck to all.

We'll be back in 2016...another year better.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

I agree with everything here except the conclusion - I do not think that this game, on the whole, is a good one. It is brutal for rookies and low-resource teams, and it's simply less fun to watch and to play than any game I can remember since 2009. While I can wholeheartedly get behind the "we need something other than shooting games" sentiment, I do not think this one is it.

I find the lack of clear contributions that can be made by simple robots this year to be particularly discouraging - in most other years I can remember, even a box-on-wheels (or something very close to a box-on-wheels) could be a valuable alliance partner.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

Overall I was disappointed in this game. It began with the animation, and the loss of poor Dozer.



In essence Recycle Rush was the polar opposite of Aerial Assault Assist. Where Aerial Assist was about working with other partners to achieve a goal while also facing off against an opponent doing the same, Recycle Rush is essentially robots playing by themselves next to each other. It's less a competition and more a technology demonstration. The complete lack of interaction between alliances outside of stealing cans within the first few seconds of the games makes the experience very boring. At the low level game it's boring because nobody will be doing much. At the high level game it's boring because the alliances will be doing the same thing each match. You could almost have some teams run autonomous throughout the entirety of the match.

In my opinion a good FRC game needs to have the following characteristics:

1. It needs to provide a compelling technical challenge.
2. The game needs to have multiple roles that require unique solutions, mitigating the likelihood of one robot doing it all.
3. There needs to be a place for a "brave little toaster" robot (ie Dozer) to have a role so that low performing teams can still participate.
4. There needs to be meaningful interaction between the robots so that each match is unique.
5. It needs to be fun and engaging to watch beyond the point at which the novelty expires.
6. The rules need to be clear and easy to understand with a minimum of subjectivity.

Ultimately IMO Recycle Rush only met two of those characteristics, as stacking bins proved to be a very good technical challenge and the rules were easy to understand. However there is no real diversity in roles, low performing teams have no real job save autonomous points, there is no interaction outside stealing cans, and spectators will quickly grow bored as robots do the same thing over and over again. Aerial Assist got 5/6 characteristics (the subjectivity of some fouls was a problem).

Hopefully next year bumpers will be back.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

This is an odd assertion statistically. If you [generic "you"] are a senior this year, you have never seen a game in which the winning Alliance Captain or their 1st Pick are more likely to be the top-ranked team by OPR at that event. Recycle Rush stands alone in the likelihood of the first 2 winning robots having highly ranked OPRs. 2012 is essentially tied at the highest levels, but even it trails off eventually.

I'm not saying that OPR should or shouldn't be used as a predictor in general or this year, or that this is a good or bad thing, or that the ranking system this year is better or worse. I only point out that OPR, being a predictor, thrives on predictability. The above trend is basically the definition of predictability for FRC.

*I'm also not arguing against the statement "Best two bots plus third strong (dual grabber) does not guarantee a championship". I agree; this is just about the comparison to previous years.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

I remember starting a thread like this a couple weeks ago. I can't say my opinion of the game has changed much since winning a regional.

Some of our team members just drove to Phoenix yesterday with me to watch the action at Arizona West. One of them decided to spend the afternoon instead at another team's build space, working on a secret weapon. I think they predicted the outcome after five minutes in the pits.

I got a chance to check out the winning robots, 3309 and 2122, in the pits. They were very similar, and looked just like machines you'd see in a factory, if factories moved empty totes around all day. I could appreciate the engineering. I even noted that 3309 did the same thing as 2122 with half as many powered systems.

That said, my brother's NERDS team was unable to beat them at their task, even with a dramatic push to bump their alliance average by 20% in semifinals. Their robot wasn't built like a factory worker. Oh, well.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

I used to have the same opinion of some teams in this thread about ramps. I felt that they were a lazy way to make a robot that never considered how to actually get game pieces into a good robot.

However a few things changed my mind:

1.) Ramps can help allow teams with less resources to compete with the best of them.
An example I found awesome was 2550 from at the Pacific Northwest District Championship. Watching their robot, which had a Kitbot drivebase and a basic elevator, seed second and consistently place 2-3 stacks using their ramp was awesome to me. They understood the strengths and weaknesses of the robot they built and used that knowledge to compete at the highest levels.

2.) They can be enable the best to do even better.
Teams 1114, 254, and 2056 use long ramps to bypass the bottleneck that is the chute door (which is a cool engineering feat in its own right). By using these ramps, these teams are able to put up staggeringly high scores and blow my mind in what I thought was possible from robots this year.

3.) Using a ramp is a trade-off.
To begin with, if your robot is tethered to a ramp, you have to start autonomous in the area of the field with the staging zones, preventing you from effectively competing in the Autonomous can race. Tethers can also provide other issues, like stacks being on top of tethers, and thus not fully supported by the scoring platform, and tethers being caught in wheels.

Overall, I really like what this year's rules have allowed for in terms of robot design. Ramps and tethers and can grabbers and conveyors are what makes this game much cooler than I expected.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

Just wait until the game outcome is decided by the only constrained resource. I suspect it will be painfully obvious who is going to win a match by how many recycling containers they have at the end of the autonomous period.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

OP- RR can be boring, but it gets boring for the same reason any other game gets boring. The problem with North Star, and the cause of OP's complaints, seems to be the huge divide between 2826 and the rest of the event. First and second were divided by 50 points, and the divide between second and third was also pretty significant. It was pretty clear what was going to happen there, and if you weren't 2826 or 3130, it'd be easy to be upset by the predictability of the event.

However, OP is wrong in singling out RR for this causing this frustration. Similar things have happened in regionals in the past. Look at Midwest 2014 or Waterloo for the last eight years. When one or two teams become so much better than everyone else at an event, all the fun is taken out because the result is obvious.

Recycle Rush isn't inherently boring. Midwest was actually VERY exciting to watch. Elimination rounds featured brilliant strategies, alliances doing the seemingly impossible, and the cheesecake to end all cheesecakes (shout out to 16 and 2358), all ending in a regional winner decided by only 6 points. The finals matches were absolutely some of the best-played, most thrilling matches I have ever seen.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

I think I speak for the majority when is say Recycle Rush should be considered the worst FIRST game. I found lunacy to me more entertaining (also since it was my first year).

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

I don't know if I'd go that far. I would say it's a combination of 2 of the worst games: 2001 Diobolical Dynamics, and 2003 Stack Attack. It borrows the 4 v 0 element of 2001 and stacking element of 2003. Granted the stacking part of 2003 wasn't the hated part.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

I used to feel the same way, that ramps were basically a crutch for sub-par landfill bots. However, I think ramps will be vital on Einstein; think, there's a strong chance an alliance will be consistently emptying the landfill of totes. So, what's next? The best way to keep putting up stacks would be the feeder, and ramps will make this viable.

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

I agree completely, but I don't think the assertion is really "RR is inherently boring". I think it's that it's statistically more likely to suffer from the boredom you've identified (e.g. Wave----->everybody else at the event). The point spreads are nuts this year. When they're not, it's not so bad (as long as you're good with watching uniformly-ish good or bad box stacking).

Re: A Recycle Rush Reflection
 

I think @evanperryg has hit the nail on the head. As the best teams get SO much better than the VAST majority, it gets harder and harder for the GDC to meet what I see as one of its biggest challenges - designing a game/engineering problem that provides some challenge for those "top" teams, while still allowing the rest of the teams to meaningfully participate. While "playing defense" is one way to solve that problem, I don't think it's the best. It would be better, IMHO, if the less advanced teams could contribute to offense, but at a lower level. (I happen to think this year was a good year in that regard, I know rational minds do differ in this regard.)

I am not sure what the answer is. Part of me keeps thinking that maybe it's time to split into two competitions, FRC and "super-FRC," while still keeping some connection so that the "ordinary" teams can be inspired by and learn from the "powerhouses." I don't really like the idea of a split, but I'm not sure how to solve the problem otherwise. The "wild card" slot helps a little (at least when a single high-powered team would get multiple 'invites' to Champs, another team or two gets to go), but then there is the whole issue of the "first alliance second pick" that usually gets a MUCH less capable (i.e., fourth-or fifth-string) robot/team into Champs, while the "second stringers" are left behind (sometimes again and again... consider a team that regularly seeds 3rd or 4th - maybe in top 10-15% of all the teams by OPR or whatever else you could use to accurately measure performance - but never is on the winning alliance (because 1 picks 2 and then handily defeats all others). If FIRST wants the BEST robots/teams at Champs (often given as the rationale for allowing #1 to pick #2), then why let a third robot "tag along" merely by the luck of being drawn? (Or worse, because they happen to be "friends" with the #1 alliance? Like the old "popularity contests" in for grade-school student government.))

Unfortunately, I have not been able to solve this problem. One idea would be to give out points in some manner throughout the season, and then the teams with the most points get to fill, say, 2/3 of the Champ slots (with the rest for award winners; I do think it's good to let, say, Rookie All-Stars, EI and CA winners, etc. go to Champs). I'm not sure how all the points should work, we could debate that all day long, but I would think that being a "2nd pick" for a winning alliance would garner (way) fewer points than seeding high, being alliance captain of a semi-final competitor, etc. Even winning an engineering-based award could count for some points. There would also have to be a way to give single-competition teams as much of a shot as those who attend several competitions. This is really a difficult problem to solve... but that doesn't mean we/they shouldn't try.