Hey all. I am one of the drivers for team 378. There seems to be a lot of confusion about what really happened in the match in question. This I think was partically cleared up by one of our alliance partneers in an earlier post. As they said what happened was originally the FIRST officals had our driver stations programmed with the wrong teams. In the first match of the round team 835 was in A1 and my team 378 were in A2. That match was fine, everything worked how it was supposed to. In the second match the first mistake was done by FIRST themselves. In position A1 they had 835 when it should have been team 85 the 3rd team in our alliance and we were in A2. They had to reprogram the drivers station. When they did the put 378 in A1 and 85 in A2. They didn't give us time to switch our human players. As an alliance the 3 of us planned to have 85 not enable during autonomous since they didn't have a autonomous that did nothing and they wanted us to the hill first. Once we pointed out what had happened FIRST granted the replay since most of the confusion was their own fault. With the replay the right robots were enabled and the rest is history. Sorry if this seems unfair to some, but for us to be shifted around like that right before we were to drive wasn't right either. I think the dicision FIRST made was right in the long run and I would hope that if faced with this same situation the officials would make the same dicision. Thanks for the time and I hope this clears up the problem.

First things first both sides had to switch stations #6's human players switched without any problem and there was more than enough time for the other alliance to do the same. So there is no reason to blame FIRST for this, it is the fault of the human players for not switching, i mean come on it common sense if the drivers are mixed up so are the human players.
The way I see it 902-494-226 are the winners no rematch needed. Before disagreeing make sure you read the rules exspecial GM3 and watch the match http://robotics.nasa.gov/events/webcasts/buckeye.htm
make up your own mind but look for what has been talking about.

I am the driver for team #378.
I feel that these events occured for a number of reasons.
1:
The officials incorrectly assumed since team #835 was the original #2 seed, that they would not defer to team #378 to play every match of the finals. Therefore, when they set up the positions for the second of the two matches, they had team #835 on the display instead of #378. The refs proceeded to switch not only the driver's positions, and the human player positions, but the radio frequencies as well. This caused the human players to be located in the wrong positions. This affected my teams autonomous mode, team #85's autonomous mode ran instead of team #378.
2:
I personally witnessed a FIRST official step on the pressure mat, causing the autonomous modes to be corrupted. However, at the time, I did not realize the threat this posed to the outcome of the match. Also, with the heat of the competition, I felt it better to play out the match rather than abandon my controls and pusue the attention of the referees.

I regret that there is a great deal of controversy about this match, but I feel that Playing the second match with all the factors being equal was the right thing to do.

Jacob Hahn
Driver, Team #378

Well, I just reviewed the video, and it is obvious that the Field Gate closer stepped on the HP pad, bell rang to start autonomous, then the member of #85 went to the pad.

However, 85's bot was the first to the stack thus starting the team off with a major advantage. At this point the drivers of the red alliance should have made the decision to notify a ref what happened. I don't think they would ask for a replay if they had won.

I'm surprised at the reaction of the Blue Alliance in this thread, very calm and collected with a 'it happens..' attitude. I have not seen a post by the winning alliance though.

I feel Blue should have been awarded what they had earned, but I'm glad they are being professional about their undeserved loss.

yeah well "animatorsarah" what ever, the "second" second match's factors were not all equal. strats were tried in the "original" second match and obviously if a team tried something once and it failed they arent gonna try it again......am i right or not??????????.............. i have heard that you guys changed ur autonomous mode codes and all this other stuff i mean im trying not to get all mad at the parties involved *one of which is my team* but i mean come on take into account the factors that would have to be changed in order to make it fair or equal.!!!!!!!!

1: If the autonomous mode was set to allow your 3rd partner, your controls would have the same problem. You would not have been able to drive your bot at all. This I could see as means for a rematch.

2: I saw the official step on it too also (via video, and clearer from soap's video). You may have decided to keep driving yes.. but you could have easily told your Human Player or Coach to get the attention of a Ref nearby. (They could have also).

Your human player should have been the first to say something when he saw your autonomous start going when he knew it wasn't supposed to.

dear God you're not kidding about confusion. I switched places twice (902) with 494. and, i was scared as heck when the guy said 'uh oh, that'll be a penalty, because i dropped all the boxes, and had to rush to get them up. you shoulda seen it, it really sooo sloppy i am now believing that the ref misunderstood the announcer (who was advising me) and either convinced 85's human player to step on, or did it himself in confusion.

however, thank's alot to all the teams who have encouraged us through this and i will not forget the kind words.

but i do have a question: my dad's company (a sponsor) wants a video tape of the regional (or atleast a few matches) where can i get one??

you can get video for the soap web site ( www.soap108.com )

The confusion equally bad on both sides. But you can tell that the ref stepping on the didn't affect when 378 didn't engage auto mode being that was what 85 wanted ( the whole backward human player thing caused it to be the wrong bot ) had the human players been in their right spots their would not have been any problem, but unfortunatly they were. But under GM3 (section 9.2 ) that is still not reason enough for a rematch ( first one in five years i've been told ). The way I see it the first time around was perfectly fair and next time make sure everyone is in the right postions.

As for me, one reason why i've been pushing this so much is I believe that we would have had a good chance at winning and it will be way harder at our next regional being one of the few ways for a even team to represent at nats I thought this was our shot and was extremely upset over this. My view is that all three teams in alliance 6 get the chance to go to nats being that we were denied the right to earn it.

Also I like to apologize to AnimatorSarah for Shark Mascot. The way his opinion was expressed was wrong and didn't actuatly represent our team. Most likely he is just upset and has been known to say things with out thinking. Sorry for team 226.

GM3 states that FIRST reserves the right to replay a match in the event of human error. There was an error made on the part of FIRST personnel at the event and the officials decided this warranted a rematch. End of story.

You were given a chance to earn it. You didn't. You lost in the semi-finals and had no chance whatsoever at qualifying for Nationals at this event. Sorry, but those are the breaks. You definitely don't deserve a spot at Nationals because you think, maybe, you might've done well enough to get there. What you think is irrelevant.

I think that, given the unusual circumstances, we should just live with FIRST's decision and move on. This matter, to me, doesn't need to be discussed nearly as much as it has. There are other more pressing inconsistencies in the way regionals have been run that, I think, warrant our attention.

If everyone that thought they 'were denied the right' earn their way to nationals went, there would be 800 teams competing at the event.

In any case, it's done. The call was made, the competition is over. There's nothing that can be done now.

- Katie

The point here is the only error made was the decision to play the rematch. Every advatage and disadvatage was given to both side for the driver station mix up leaving the first time perfectly fair. Being that the human players stayed mixed on the one side is not the error FIRST but that of the teams involved. So why should they be rewarded with a rematch because they failed to switch human players. I do relize that this most likely was not infomation that was brought up at the competition, but it does show the vaildness of the match.

As for the whole nats thing, I know not everyone would agree but in this case it appears to be the only fair thing to do. By no means would I want to discredit those who did win. But we did everything required and weren't even allowed to try. Just try and look from Alliance #6's point of view. Here you have three bots that work great together, they manage a come from behind win then are force to replay a perfectly fair match still win the match but fall just short of offsetting the first lose.

the right call
 

When they first made the call to replay the match I disagreed. But once it was explained that it was a FIRST error - and once it became obvious that the FIRSt error cost 85 their first move (manually knocking over the big stack after auto-mode ended), I agreed that they made the right call.

I don't think it makes sense for people to suggest that a team should stop in the middle of a match and complain to the refs. Any complaints should be taken up afterward, so that people can play the game.

Ken

hey all sorry for any thing said earlier that sounded really stupid and messed but im kinda like ya *my gf broke up with me today so im kinda looking for anything to complain about* but sorry for any inconvience I may have caused *sorry scott* i would like to know though what will become of this issue and how is it going to be resolved.

Nothing will become of this, and it has already resolved itself. Sorry to sound so harsh, but in the overall scheme of things, this has no importance, and noone cares.
Moral: Its called life, get over it

Cory

*i was appologizing for my earlier action*