Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

I'm surprised that in my entire reply this was the part you fixated on.

My point was more relevant to this story, although I've heard this from others.

When all four teams were contesting the ruling, the ref said "You should all be GP and accept the ruling and move on" which was mindblowing to me.

The only thing that was GP was the four teams telling the ref the ruling was wrong.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

Git yer facts straight--they been usin' it last year, and before that too on a more limited basis. Anyways, I'll be going a lot more in-depth. I can give several. I've been part of the last couple of discussions on instant replay.
I'm going to start with the (heavily) emphasized part. For instant replay, you need a camera. Cameras cost money, in some amount. They need to be pointed at the area of interest, and they need to be of quality good enough to see what you're looking at (AKA, is it a foul). That means a reasonably high-resolution camera, and probably somebody to operate it. Both of which can cost money, in a somewhat larger amount than just a random dude with a cellphone.

Now, that paragraph is the major argument against instant replay. You need to have the money for coverage of all the possible areas of fouls--MLB is probably the most points of any major sport, at 5 points (ball, 3 bases, home). The others, you're mainly going to be near the ball, so one camera could work... but how many do they have, like 3-4 easily?. FRC? In an area the size of a basketball court, with action at both ends, six robots, 3+ humans... You've got 6-8 potential "zoom-in" points. One camera isn't going to cut it--there's been technical analysis done, I can bring up that thread if you like. You need 3-4 at least, with operators who actually know what they should be pointing at. (The "replays" during Einstein... eh, not so great...)


But wait! There's more! In addition to the technical problem, there's the logistics problem. Namely, the twin problem of actually calling for an instant replay, and then retrieving the footage for review and reviewing it. Now, for elims, that's not all that difficult: Alliance captain gets ONE coupon, to be used at his/her discretion, end of story. (Quals... big bag of worms, not going to go there, but sooner or later, someone will be complaining that they missed seeding #1 because of a call going against them and they'll demand instant replay for quals too.) But actually getting to recorded footage is going to need MORE equipment. You'll need a monitor. And a recording device (at FRC events, there isn't recording, just streaming, unless the streaming crew also records onsite). And a way to get the footage from "recording" to "reviewing" promptly. Did I mention money? How about the setup time to locate the action in question?


There have been some proposals for instant replay before--the big problems are that #1, the quality of the picture wouldn't have been very good; #2, getting what you want to look at in the picture; #3, the equipment isn't cheap so someone would need to pony up the money; #4, you can't solve more than 2 of the above easily. That being said, I would suspect that if someone (read: YOU) came up with a workable plan and pitched it to an offseason event, they'd at least be willing to listen, even if they didn't try it. And they'd probably go into why it wouldn't work.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

I dunno what to say that hasn't already been said.

Take a step back, take some deep breaths, if the outcome of this wasn't to your liking then remember this time for what went right and what was good. Dwelling on the negatives in this situation in this manner is not conducive to positive change.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

They already have people operating cameras to livestream the events; why not use a video splitter to split the matches based on the match sounds? It really shouldnt be that hard to do and tbh FIRST needs to step up their game when it comes to recording matches.

Also I see no reason why you should not be allowed to bring your own footage into a discussion. You are trying to right a wrong and not get punished for a mistake that was made. I don't know why this rule is but besides the issue of time (you could easily do this by limiting video review to 2min or something like that) but I'm interested to know why it's not allowed.

I'm also interested to hear about what FIRST has to says about this situation if they havent responded already.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

This is getting ridiculous.

My hyperbole meter is pegging.

Here are the blunt facts about the right way (in general) to deal with this sort of situation, when it happens:

• The student leader representing the team/alliance that was penalized should have contested the penalty (I assume that one did) by citing a rule that they believed had been violated or applied incorrectly; and by describing the remedial action (allowed by the rules) they wanted the referees to take.
• The referees should have used due diligence to investigate the situation and determine the facts of what happened, as well as recollections allowed.
• The referees should have then announced to the affected teams a decision that took into account the facts they were able to establish, and the rules that applied to those facts. That decision (of course) must satisfy all rules of the competition.

When I am ref'ing and students want to protest a call; if the students do their part of the process I outlined above, I give them a mental +1 for having learned a valuable skill. When students don't do their part, I try to guide them, but some times it gets tough.

When you get to World Championship levels, if you aren't familiar with all the rules, and with how to register an effective protest, you have done yourself a grave injustice.

Anyone asking FTC refs (who probably don't even have the authority to cause a rematch - I presume that only the FTA has that authority, but I might be wrong) to cause a replay, because of what they believe was a mistaken penalty call; shot themselves in the foot.

So far, I haven't read evidence that a proper protest, containing a proper requested-remedy was lodged, and then rejected capriciously. If I was reading that, I would be upset.

Instead I have been reading about a bunch of other stuff.

So, you can color me grumpy; because, like I said, this is getting ridiculous.

Blake

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

In FTC, the Head Referee has the final say on replaying a match. It is the FTA's responsibility, however, to determine that there was in fact a field fault and that a replay is necessary. As an FTA in FTC, I have never experienced a situation first hand when I brought up the need for a rematch with the head ref and they refused. That being said, I know the head refs in Minnesota personally, and the Minnesota FTC volunteer crew is pretty close. It might be different in other areas-- I know that there's variation on how penalties are called and volunteer roles between regions.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

The Head Referee is the one that has the authority, and the only one with that authority. Although you are partially correct because most of the conditions that lead to a replay are technical issues that primarily fall under the FTA.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

Thanks (sincerely) for the clarification of my parenthetical comment.

Let's all notice that after this clarification, the point I was making remains intact - that you are shooting yourself in the foot, barking up the wrong tree, and losing valuable time, if you ask a referee and/or other event staffers to apply the replay-remedy to resolve a protest involving what you feel is a mistaken call.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

I had already shared other thoughts related to other points you brought up earlier in this thread, which is why I didn't repeat them again.

Maybe this wasn't the best place to share my frustrations from the other side, but I have also seen many interactions where team members have been incredibly rude and un-GP to refs and other volunteer staff. I wasn't there, so I don't know what happened on either end. It just frustrates me that event volunteers are so often torn apart, in person and online. Sorry for taking things off-topic.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

I don't have any solutions to add to the conversation, but maybe can add some perspective:

https://youtu.be/TdewERComl4?t=2m35s

2013 Einstein.

Our alliance was officially eliminated from the FRC Champs after the loss in this match.

It turns out that a very well-meaning volunteer had miscounted the number of discs scored. They wrote down 64 discs scored instead of 46 on the scoresheet for our opponents, and we lost the match.

Although it's not identical to your situation, it has parallels.

We made our case to the refs, multiple times. We were turned away, multiple times. In fact, at one point we fully accepted that our chance at a World Championship would be taken away due to a scoring error. We pulled our robots off to the side, put our tools away, and reflected on the end of our Einstein run. Shortly after being eliminated from Einstein, we took this picture:



This picture still amazes me to this day. The smiles you see there are genuine. We just had one of the worst possible things imaginable happen to an FRC team: we were officially eliminated on Einstein due to a scoring error! Yet we were still happy that we left everything we had on the field, and were so proud of what he had accomplished - even if we didn't get the chance to move on.

Had our champs ended right then and there, I actually think we would've been okay with it. Genuinely. Call us weird, but I think that is 100% a reflection of the type of people and teams we were/are.

Of course, we didn't exactly give up, either. With the robots for Finals 1 already lined up on the field, our students made one final request to the refs. We bolstered our case, not with video as the rules were very clear on this, but with mathematics. We ultimately presented a "proof" showing that the score was mathematically impossible based on the autonomous score, pyramid points, and the number of unscored discs left on the floor and in the human player stations at the end of the match.

The refs congregated.

The scorers congregated.

Something was happening.

They found the scoring error where 64 was written instead of 46, the volunteer responsible confirmed it, they corrected it, changed the outcome of the match, and pulled the robots off the field to play a deciding SF match instead of the finals.

So yes, this is an example of FRC "getting it right" (although I am sure the situation left a bitter taste to the alliance of 3476, 1640 and 303 - and who could blame them), but this was a very difficult situation that I have to give FIRST and the volunteers a lot of credit for.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

To your first point, that's person. Singular. If you're trying to tell me that one camera is enough, I raise you a case where three refs all saw (or didn't see) the same thing that would have been very difficult to get a camera on with multiple cameras, let alone a single camera. A video splitter would be nice... got some money for FIRST to get one? Remember, and do I need to repeat myself, FIRST doesn't record the footage to my knowledge. AT ALL. So that means that somebody else has to record it.

And I happen to see a very good reason or two why you shouldn't be allowed to bring your own footage into a discussion. First is the crowding around the field. That's one extra person who has to come in, and then leave--and hopefully the review area isn't crowded (har har--ever been down by the field between matches? Yeah. Not quite rush hour on L.A. freeways, but pretty crowded.) Second, the quality of the replay. You bring in your camcorders shooting from the top of the stands, OK. And you view on their screen, you can't see anything, so you hook up to a monitor (which means that everybody's gotta have their adapter cables). Well, maybe the footage is pixelly... or aimed at the wrong robot... or blocked by cheering... or other similar items. Gotta do something about that, maybe. And third, there are a couple of potential fairness complaints. Along the lines of: "We don't have anybody taking video because we can barely get anybody to show up, and this other team has 5 camera operators on all their matches, and all the calls go their way" (yeah, I'm exaggerating) or "We can't get a good angle" or "We had the exact same play as these guys and they got their bad call reversed on video, ours should be too"...


Again, this whole issue has been discussed ad nauseum before. I should know. I started a serious thread to discuss the issues and potential solutions a couple years back. (Also take a look at the links in the first post in that thread.)

I'm thinking that this is going to be like the card system. IRI ran that for something like 6 years before FIRST adopted it--for Breakaway!

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

I'll jump in on this story as well. I can't speak for 303 and 3476, but I think 610 and us have both learned to love this story, though for very different reasons. It took our team a long time to get over this, not because of the fixed scoring error--that was entirely correct--but because of FIRST's perpetual "the show must go on" attitude, which is what we're talking about now. I offer this as an anecdote in dealing with that show-centric pressure, though our experience is of course less terrible than a 46-->64 scoring error.

When that wrong score first went up, our initial reaction was 'huh? that can't be...', almost immediately replaced with 'oh, cr*p, we've got to prep for finals!' This is a huge deal strategically and in terms of what we focused on in the pit, and we worked on it all throughout the intervening downtime. Then suddenly it was 'change your bumper colors'. What? And on the spot, 'you're playing semi 3'. We blinked, 'hey, wait, we need a timeout. Give us a minute'. A move like that that changes things, playing a different alliance than you'd just prepped for at such a high level. The answer was "you're playing semi 3". (Note that this was in the bad old days before the Einstein showers really interacted with the teams in it. They consciously and systematically altered this in 2014, I suspect based on 610 and our experience.) My drive team was in shock, and I have to admit that I felt blindsided all the way through that immediate match. There's no question we weren't playing our best game for that matchup, and it left me bitter for a long time: not that the matchup happened as it needed to, but that FIRST was so totally show-centric and that they couldn't give me and my kids 6 minutes, or 4 or 3, to wrap their heads around what just happened. To examine the process and conclusion and come to terms with it as correct. But primarily, that I hadn't (when I said 'oh, cr*p, we have to prep for finals') prepared adequately for the eventuality that any change would happen so fast that we ought to have been prepping strategically for two different Einstein matches. There was just no precedent, and I fell back on 'FIRST wouldn't do that'.

There was no precedent for this of course, and in a choice between playing semi 3 or final 1, any unanimous vote is semis 3. Being rushed into a match you knew nothing about after a process you knew nothing about against an alliance that's been fully preparing for the whole time it is nothing like a scoring error. But "waiting for the teams" was never a voting option in the Big Show. So the best line I had for drying tears afterwards was that we'd given it our all under even more pressure than Einstein is supposed to be. Let me tell you, this does nothing for kids that feel like their prep time was deliberately stolen so they'd have to play handicapped against a more ready alliance. Who felt like they'd been duped, and were humiliated that they hadn't coped with it and done what they knew was their best. It was absolutely miserable. You know what did do something to address that? TheoryofTexanCoyotes and Frank Merrick. Thank you.* Thank you. It took a while--too long, due again to the poor timing communication between the show and the teams--but eventually the process started to make sense. There's no way the alliance did this deliberately, and from FIRST it was blindsiding, but it wasn't deliberate. It should've been slower (to play after the decision) and more transparent, but it wasn't personal. We're part of a show, and we deal with that pressure and all that it means. Pain is what you make of it, kids. Pain is what you make of it.

Then one of my kids (my pit captain, still crying) turned to me and said 'next year we're coming back here, and we're GONNA DO IT RIGHT'.


That's her there on the right.


*So in the end it took us longer, but thanks in part to their communication, we did end up looking like TheoryofTexanCoyotes in Mr. Lim's photo. The speed with which they did this on their own is a huge testament to the incredible professionalism and immense institutional knowledge of that alliance, and they ended up being an honor to lose to. Congratulations on the win, by the by. And by that I mean winning the 2013 World Championship, since Mr. Lim was too humble to point out how well they ended up!

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

Here's my suggestion: focus your energies on influencing improvements and reflecting on the value of the journey. That can result in better future results. Please avoid putting your energy into over the top rhetoric. It is unproductive and does not make you appear wise.

I agree with the idea that the competition aspect is important and is what drives a lot of the effort and success we see in FRC. That only goes so far with me, though. I grow tired of the "competition is everything" soapbox activity, which has been exacerbated by the dual championship announcement. The journey is still where the value lies, and a trophy is just a trophy. If you were likely good enough to win but didn't because an unfortunate circumstance intervened, it doesn't help to get mad about it. I recognize that people are emotional creature that will experience anger and disappointment. Still, hanging onto those feelings isn't going to result in the greatest level of happiness and success in the long run. Better to focus on the objective realities that exist, the positives that came out of the journey, and the aspects that can be improved for the future.

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

For those advocating professional-level instant replay, here's a good article on how Major League Baseball implemented their replay system, which is considered to be the state of the art. Now think about how much that cost to implement and operate.

For reference, MLB had about $9 billion in revenues last year, vs FIRST revenues of about $55.5 million. FRC cost about $36 million to operate in 2014; FTC about $3 million.

Two final notes:

many people think of "fraud" as a pretty strong word, particularly in the context of critiquing the actions of one volunteer

future employers often use web searches to find out more about potential employees; it's worth examining posts in that context before pushing the "post" button

Re: The Fraud of FTC Worlds - How FTC & FIRST have failed me forever.
 

Would would be the ethics of calling this a Arena Fault and replaying? Especially if teams and at least one volunteer agree