Re: Championship Results
 

I know it's early, but it looks like updates are, once again, not being kept current.

Re: Championship Results
 

This situation is really quite pathetic. We pay how many thousands of dollars for this and they can not even update a web page with scores? TBA is doing it manually. Can't FIRST AT LEAST do that as well?

They want to run two world championships and they can't even get one right......

Re: Championship Results
 

And then there's this: https://twitter.com/BaselThe2nd/stat...20359981371392

Is this real life?

Re: Championship Results
 

It seems that the FIRST team is very concerned about "the championship experience", but only for those who are in attendance at the stadium.


Right at the moment, the results on the web page seem up to date, but I think they are just updating at lunchtime.

Re: Championship Results
 

So, which of you are planning to become FTAs next season to help solve these issues?

Re: Championship Results
 

Me, but that has more to do with the fact VA will be moving to Districts than the issues with the API.

Re: Championship Results
 

So you are saying it is the volunteer's responsibility to make sure the FIRST webpage reports scores in a timely manner? Really?

Re: Championship Results
 

It depends entirely on where the issue is. If the issue is with the field at the arena then yes, it calls under the FTA, if the issue is with the API, on the website side, then the blame lies with who ever was responsible for that.

Re: Championship Results
 

With all due respect, how much of this is actually an FTA problem? Having worked with the scorpion cases before I can understand the computer crashing before the score was committed. I'm honestly impressed that they managed to get everything back up and running that quickly and that they only lost one match.

I think the bigger complaint here is regarding the fact that the scores aren't updating period (except for at lunch and at the end of the day), and that the webcast quality is questionable at best. Neither one of those are FTA related, but rather instead they are problems that FIRST needs to address and probably should have addressed before planning on holding 8 simultaneous events in the same arena. The API worked for many more simultaneous events earlier in the season across the country, so I suspect it's an issue with the uplinks.

I agree with you that a lot of the people here on Chief Delphi complain and don't offer anything constructive or helpful, but calling people out and telling them to go volunteer won't help if the problem isn't a volunteer-based problem.

Re: Championship Results
 

I'd like to, and I'm working towards it, but I should probably graduate college first.
But more this. And don't forget FTA is not a volunteer position, FIRST certification is required.

Re: Championship Results
 

FTA does require FIRST certification, but they are still volunteers and not necessarily employees of FIRST*. Having been an FTAA for the last 4 years, I'd love to become involved as an FTA at an event, but being in college has prevented me from spending the time to get the certification.

*Yes, I do know that several FTAs are FIRST employees that go to events across the country.

Re: Championship Results
 

I don't think this is an FTA issue. It sounds like it's more in line with the outcomes of the community and HQ attempted brain meshing in the offseason to get a system that works for FIRST and the community. I think Zach Orr and David Carr are two people who are on this board who also participated and they could give more detail about that.

Re: Championship Results
 

This is really getting aggravating! I understand having issues the first week but were 8 weeks into this! Regardless who is responsible, I personally feel like there are more than enough people in this development community that could have helped fix issues... and would have been more than willing too. For me like many others who host third party sites its difficult to explain to people that FIRST is at fault because there are no results. Nor is it fun to open emails from very angry parents telling me to get my "stuff" straight when I'm not at fault.

This API has been a let down this whole season...

Re: Championship Results
 

Really? That's one of the oldest and most tired rebuttals of someone who complains about FIRST's abhorrent operations track record. I've been around long enough to remember the disastrous seasons that FMS has been through. This isn't as bad as the seasons that had wrong rankings at Week One events, non-functional automatic goal counters, the infamous schedule-of-doom, and fog horning of matches when too many points were scored in autonomous. But this is week 8. We kind of assumed they would have things working by now, especially since weeks 2-7 were solid and there was no indication of problems heading into this weekend. We're frustrated because we, the 3rd party providers who rely on a working FRC data feed, get slammed with emails & complaints asking why our product is broken, when in fact it's doing a wonderful job of serving up stale data.

Many of the complainers in this topic have done a lot for FIRST both now and in the past. Phil & Eugene spend their free time helping the FRC community by hacking on TBA. I work on Spyder and helped pull the FVC FMS out of the crapper during its first few seasons. We've all done more than enough for FIRST to earn the right to complain a bit.

And as many have said already in this thread, this isn't a problem that can be solved by an FTA. This falls squarely on FIRST IT / engineering and the poor API they rolled out. Early on, it was obvious they didn't have a good grasp on how to implement it properly and on schedule. "Put it in the cloud" and "rely on Microsoft to scale" aren't answers, they're cop-outs for poor engineering.

Re: Championship Results
 

Last I heard it was due to bandwidth issues, not sure if it was venue-side or FIRST-side.