Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

It's really disturbing how many refs and judges appear to be shrugging problems off this year. I know team 1294 had 2 robots on the ramp at PNW, and they didn't get counted. The reffs eventually counted one, but not 2 (which would have won them the match) The full story is here

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

How can third-, fourth-, and fifth-year teams show up at tournaments 20+ pounds overweight? I am dumbstruck at how much swisscheesifying and component removage I saw at PNW. We were bummed that we were three pounds over (last year we were over by 20 ounces), and we know we aren't the sharpest knife in the FIRST drawer.

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

Hmm...

Well, since I'm a college student this year, I wasn't down on the field that much. I can't tell you how they interfaced personally.

I will tell you that I LOVED the addition of on-the-field reffing immediately after the field.

But I swear to you that on Saturday I saw about 10 offsides going uncalled. It was just weird...I don't know. I'll leave that judgement to people who interfaced with refs personally this year. All I can say for sure is that I was not impressed with the length and breadth of the technical difficulties at the BAE GSR this year, whether it be the inability to display the rankings or the befuddling scoring system that seemed consistently off.

Ah well. First year for progressive scoring, I think, so there are some understandable bugs to work out.

--Petey

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

Are others as surprised as I am with the number of robots that end up tipped over?
I can understand those that flip over when climbing on the ramp, but I've seen lots that were in the middle of the field.
In one match I saw 2 robots pushing each other straight on and both flipping over backwards as the result (didn't either of these think about driving backwards?)
I would have thought by limiting the area of allowable interaction, that the robots wouldn't have tipped over as easily. Guess not.
Yes, Yes, Yes, - Know all about those that are top heavy are gonna be easier to tip - but I didn't think it would be often as I was seeing.
(Even with the cg 2 1/2 feet from the ground, you only have a very short moment arm with the contact zone being so close to the ground (2 1/2 to 8)
Anyways - maybe its simply a by-product of the amount and type of defensive tactics be applied with this years game format.

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

Nah, we didn't get screwed over...296 did! We got the benefit of the screwup. I just felt bad for them, honestly, because we tied them in a match where it seemed like we should have lost.

And meaubry...yeah a ton of robots tipped. It was surprising, but not entirely unexpected, and could be exploited (fairly) by smart robots.

--Petey

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

Observations based upon participation in New Jersey Regional:

1. 25 is extremely good, but they were made even better by the facts that

A.) It seemed no one ever once tried to prevent them from loading up on human player ammo all day - starve an HP loaded only launcher and it's as tame as a kitten. If you are on offense, I highly doubt all 3 robots will be in position to score points, so use one of them to hinder HP loader bots from refilling while they are on defense.

B.) Few seemed to grasp the idea that low shooter + getting between the shooter and the center goal with your robot = not many balls getting into the center goal. Some teams aimed to disrupt 25 by setting up in the near starting position and running into their SIDE during autonomous, but that does no good when the robot has an auto-adjusting camera controlled turret to correct any side to side perturbations. There were numerous teams at that event who could have beaten 25 (and other autonomous low shooters who move to a fixed position on the field) to their launch position, gotten in FRONT of them, and blocked every single shot. I would have enjoyed a chance at accomplishing this feat, but alas......

2. ......THE *RANDOM* MATCH LIST GENERATOR IS STILL A PILE OF JUNK. We didn't face or ally with 25 once (a desirable thing for any newcomer to the New Jersey Regional to do, you would think - a major disappointment for our team), yet some teams faced them 2 times. FIX THE PROBLEM!!!!!

3. FIRST better get their act straight SOON when it comes to the numerous field control and scoring glitches, or you are going to have a mass uprising on your hands. I returned home to Warren, OH at 3:25 AM after driving back from New Jersey. This late return was due in no small part to the HOURS of delays teams and spectators had to endure from the ridiculous amount of restarts and field downtimes. This is at least the 2nd year in a row these problems have been permitted to leak into the competition season, especially during the first few weeks, and it seems even worse this year. FIRST, HATCH TECHNOLOGIES, and whomever else is responsible for developing the field control systems - FIX THE PROBLEM, or find the number of registrants for 1st week regionals dwindle away and die. WE ARE NOT YOUR GUINEA PIGS!!!! My registration fees are not there for you to spend on people who develop buggy, regional experience and audience interest-degrading software and hardware. If you do not do more to improve your quality control and accelerate your testing and debug, you may find those fees absent from future seasons. I will gladly pay a lot less money to someone who isn't FIRST to attend more offseason events like the IRI where the probability of playing on fully debugged fields is 80000% greater. This is one area where I will be more gracious when FIRST starts being more professional. I can only imagine how these numerous problems could hurt teams who work their hardest to scrape together enough dough to attend a single Week 1 event.

4. This game has the potential to be quite fun. Offense will get better (much better, in our case) as the weeks go on as teams improve their shooters and start to understand the game better. Thankfully, defense is back with a vengeance, albeit perhaps too much so. I witnessed a lot of tough pushing and blocking - no free license to score for the offensive powers this year! You gotta earn it, and that's wonderful. Lots of high CG and/or short wheelbase robots are tipping over on the ramp or even through normal operation in the middle of the playing field, self inflicted or otherwise. I did see a fair amount of what I would define to be long distance ramming and penalizable (is that a word?) tipping that wasn't flagged. The 25 driving up on 293, 293 backing up to avoid tipping them (which I'm pretty sure they didn't legally have to do if they didn't want to - why should you have to limit your movements to protect a robot that mistakenly drove up on you and not the other way around?), 25 driving underneath 293 seconds later, and 25 continuing to drive forward until 293 fell over sequence in the elims raised a few eyebrows in my area of the stands when no flags were thrown. I didn't see it, but 48's robot also apparently got under 56 and accidentally tipped them in a qualifying match without penalty (we apologized to them following the match). With the tipping rules, I believe intent isn't a factor. It's black and white - if you initiate the act of having one robot's drivetrain be on top of another's and a tipped robot results, you must deal with the consequences. If you get under another bot and push them over, you receive the penalties. If you drive up on top of another robot and you end up on your butt as a result, tough cookies - don't do that next time!

5. Why in the world do so many HP's chuck balls up toward the corner goals like crazy during the 2nd and 3rd periods when they are on offense? Does anyone realize how few of those balls actually make it into the goals? All you are doing is giving opposing backbots with ball collectors more opportunities to load up and use those unrealized points against you. It also clutters the audience's view and makes it harder to see where robot shots are coming from. Save your balls in your ball corrals for human player robot loading or feeding directly to the backbot(s) during defense. And remember, balls in your ball corral are balls that can't ever be used by your opposition against you. In the 4th period, with a relatively uncluttered field and clear line of sight, that's when you start firing away at those corner goals. And make sure the balls are ROLLING, not bouncing, well before they reach the ramp.

6. Winning autonomous is absolutely critical to an alliance's overall chances of success during a match. I think the proof is in the pudding here. Most people have been saying this for months, and the early regional action is proving their predictions true.


Despite all the problems, the New Jersey Regional proved to be a fun, spirited albeit way too freaking long event filled with a bunch of great teams. Our team is very excited heading into Buckeye next week. I have heard, however, that the New Jersey field is scheduled to be shipped to Cleveland next. This makes me cringe (although I'm sure all the fields have been experiencing problems). I hope the problems plaguing the field control systems and causing stress for all the valiant volunteers responsible for keeping it limping along are minimized.

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

Autonomous is huge. Not because of the bonus, but because of the beautiful, open opportunity it gives you to score 10 balls in the center goal. If you are a powerful shooter then you get defended and pushed all around.

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

We were in a pushing match with another strong robot at the VCU regional in the quarter final. Both robots simply pushed so hard that they flipped. I don't know why our driver didn't back off, but things happen quickly when you have a lot of power and a lot of traction. Our robot can do a pretty good wheelie from a standing start, and the CG is probably not even 2 ft. off the ground, and weight is almost centered over the wheels that lift. The tall structures on both robots didn't help matters.

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

My thoughts on week 1:

From a "designing" and "playing" perspective, I really think FIRST got this game right, FOR US. It truly allowed teams of all levels and capabilities to be useful in many capacities. Like FIRST Frenzy (2004), there were many different opportunities to score, but unlike it, there was no one powerhouse move, with the exception of the ramp for the 25-point bonus, which often required cooperation. This provides all teams with the ability to make an effective robot, and if a team knew their limits and built accordingly, they could make an effective machine that didn't have to shoot balls.

I do agree with a previous poster, though, that allowing the autonomous-winning team to go on defense first is VERY one-sided. This is largely due to the fact that a alliance that wins auton 30 - 27 (10 balls made in vs 9) now has the chance to get even more balls AND gets a 10-point bonus. That's QUITE lopsided, and as I mentioned back at our kickoff, it is critical to win it.

That said, there are some awesome new programming opportunities to get autonomous working better, and thanks largely to Kevin Watson, I actually did see quite a few teams trying to get the camera module working. We got it working in our pits toward the end of competition, but didn't want to risk using it out on the field when we were getting close to the end. We're looking forward to testing it more in Atlanta, though, and hope to see more teams use it like 1403, 103, and 25 (just to name a few) did.

For untrained spectators, unfamiliar with FIRST, it is more difficult to see what's going on and know what's happening. This does take some of the appreciation of the game away, but seeing lots of balls flying and robots tipping can still be amusing.

Once again, having a first-week regional means having an enormous amount of issues with the field. This has happened before, but as T. Hoffman said, it's awful that first week regionals are often guinea pigs for FIRST fields. I pray that they can come up with a new system for doing this in the future.

All in all, I really enjoy this game, and while it's not as spectator friendly as Triple Play, it opened many more doors for teams, and I like seeing a variety of robots again!

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

I thought that the defence aspect of the game has been missing the previous two seasons. It adds a new layer to the strategy. Yesterday at PNW I saw, what the announcer described as "the carnage", 4 robots tipped over turning it into a 1v1 match. And, I saw all 6 robots on their respective ramps during one of the finals matches. Final 1-2 all of our points were scored during auton and we won the match 14 to 5. So i would say that auton is huge. Over all i like this game and found myself cheering out of my seat for much of the day.

P.S. Tipping is part of this years game like it or not.

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

where there any ramming penalties given during auto-mode? i saw multiple teams fly across the field and hit the opposing robots in an attempt to block them.

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

I didn't hear of any ramming penalties at all at VCU, which surprised me, because I saw a lot of hard hits.

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

1626 nearly destroyed themselves one match.
They hit so hard a large piece of their robot flew off and then it raced to the other side of the field and smashed into that side.
Treat your babies with care folks. Dail down the speed or program it to stop short so you flush six weeks of hard work down the tubes due to a programming mistake.

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

I think that tipping is a part of this years game, because you can tip another robot easily and accidentally (ESPECIALLY if they are on the ramp)

I know that right now my team's defensive autonomous is NOT at full speed due to the fact that we don't want to break anything if we go ramming into the side of the field (which the program does every time if it doesn't hit a robot on the way)

Re: Week 1: Thoughts, comments
 

I posted these thoughts after day 1 at the BAE Granite State Regional:
After Saturday, here are my additional comments/revisions:

1. Like I mentioned after Friday, autonomous is so important for the very reason that you aren't covered. The only exception to what I posted before is what team 1276 did: they climbed the opponent's ramp and shot from there. This gave them perfect accuracy, while at the same time making them undependable. Many teams could not climb the ramp at all, and while they pretty much all could in the elimination rounds, none were really built to climb it easily (it's just such a deceptively hard task). They had absolutely forever to take their shots but at the same time did not need long to line up and take them. As far as I know, they only had a defensive autonomous mode, but it didn't matter because they just picked shooters with strong autonomous modes for their alliance, which let them interfere with the opponent's autonomous while their alliance took its own shots. They would be the only team to score anything of note in the rest of the game (as a result, their alliance swept in all their elimination matches easily to win the regional). My congratulations to team 1276 on solving this years game!

2. If this regional taught me anything about what it takes to end up picking on Saturday, it's simply that you need to be consistent. You need not score an awful lot, just that you must be a constant contributor. The number 1 seed at the Granite State Regional (151) was, to be brutally honest, not a team that I would even imagine picking. They were a human-loaded push-bot that tried to score via a low-mounted wheel on the side of their bot, and would generally only score a maximum of about 5 balls in the corner goals over the entire match (their alliance was eliminated in the quarterfinals 2-1). The key was that they would score 2-3 points in autonomous, play strong on defence, and climb the ramp every single game. This consistently scored a respectable number of points, and got them to the number 1 seed. My congratulations to team 151!

3. I was wrong in assuming that the scores would be much higher on Saturday than Friday. They may have been by a thin margin, but by no amount great enough to change the strategy of the game. The points I made after Friday pretty much all still apply.

4. I saw the games in the elimination rounds play out two distinct ways:
a. Both teams would similarly in autonomous, and the ten point bonus became a difficult but surmountable advantage for one of the alliances. The competition would come down to whether or not the other team could sneak through enough points, and getting up the ramp could sometimes swing games (usually to secure games, the alliance winning would have one robot defend their opponent's ramp, and it always worked). Usually, the team that won autonomous won these games.
b. One team scores 20-30 in autonomous while the other scores almost nothing. The winning team has a 25-30+ point advantage, and wins handily. In fact, the team that loses autonomous tends to defend so poorly (their moral seems understandably crushed, plus they are forced to focus on offense too much to have even the slightest chance) that the winners often win by a 40-50+ point margin and the only penalty that means anything is disqualification (which actually happened in the semifinals to one alliance).

It is my bold prediction that while teams will get better on offence, teams will similarly get better on defence, so most qualifying and nearly all elimination games will continue to follow these models for the entire season.







That pretty much wraps it all up. Good luck to all the teams competing at upcoming regionals. My team (166) will be at Atlanta, hopefully doing better than we did this weekend (we finally have a shooting autonomous just about worked out :D ). Please feel free to comment on my observations.