Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

Echoing Jared's statement. The tubes in NJ were indeed over-inflated.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

We were watching them repair tubes, they were using wooden gauges as per Bill's Blog.

Edit: I saw them in use from the stands, don't know if they were used properly. However, I'm building gauges tomorrow and checking our tubes.....

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

The tubes were being struggled into the gauges. I lol'd.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

The middle becomes full of tubes so if you can pick up off the ground, that's great but if you can't, you really need to be able to. Also, if a tube gets stuck in the safe zone and you can't pick it up, you are kinda stuck..expecially if it's an uber tube in which case you won't be able to anyway.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

G16 only penalizes you for hanging an ubertube in teleop. There is no rule preventing you from possessing one.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

Using them and using them properly are two very different things.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

Oh, that is true. I just didn't have the most recent version of the manual. Thanks!

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

Some of you who are harping on my comment ignored the qualifier, "seriously consider"...

I didn't say "OMGZORZ YOU NEED 2 REDESIGN UR ROBOTZ!!!11!!!1!!elebenty!!"

For what I saw, I stand by my initial assessment. I am quite certain that some people will disagree -- and that's okay.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

The third thing that stood out to me at FLR was the huge spread in driver skills. Many teams seemed to be just learning how to drive their robots. Driving into the tower bases while picking up a tube or knocking down another tube while placing one are just not good signs. The few teams that had their driving skills down to a science did really well.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

I believe somoene in the live chat noted how some of the teams "just sit confused" in the field.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

Minibots are more important than tubes. If you don't have a minibot, go make one. If you don't have a deployment system, go make one of those too. Seriously.

Even though the game is called "Logomotion" in most Qualification matches I played in and saw, Tubes could not, and did not offset the points scored by a single minibot.

The tubes aren't a constant size. Make sure your gripper can grab anything between 6" and 9".

(Seriously though, I really hope that Team update 17 comes out and devalues the minibot race by at least 1/3rd. 30 points is way too much for first place, especially considering that you need to make two complete logos on the top row to offset ONE minibot going up the pole and getting first place. Why call the game Logomotion if it's not about making the FIRST logo? If we wanted to play with mini robots then we'd go play in FTC or VRC.)

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

But that's what FIRST wants, remember? They made the minibot race dramatically huge so that we'd invest in the FTC kit, hopefully competing in the 2011-2012 FTC game.

It's too bad the most competitive minibots involve modifying Tetrix components to the point of uselessness in FTC, and that it effectively turns Logomotion into a coin flip (if heads, your team's minibot doesn't combust halfway up the pole and cost you the event!)

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

I'd be surprised they did change that, even if it was to a 20-15-10-5 scale. That fundamentally changes the game and you would be unfairly penalizing the teams that focused on the minibot.

Teams made decisions on strategy based on the game described. While we didn't focus all our attention on the minibot, there are teams that did and would be significantly handicapped if point values changed.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

A couple of things I've noticed:

Lane incursion penalties are very common, and difficult to avoid. Nobody was immune, it seemed. They don't necessarily decide a match, but they can and have.

Minibots are huge. I only saw a few matches where a match was won on strength of tubes vs a minibot.

There were way more minibots present then there were reliable ways to deploy them. Deployment was, far and away, the missing element for a lot of teams. Till finals there were very few real races decided by minibot speed, but plenty decided by sticky or otherwise slow deployment. Reliability is paramount, with speed a distant second.

Re: Lessons learned for Week 2 Regionals?
 

The funny thing is that all of the "super fast" minibots that I've seen use 4 tetrix parts at most - Motors, batteries, and the on/off switch.

I understand that devaluing the minibot would hurt some teams that focused on that, but what about the teams that focused on putting up tubes? You're telling me that all of the work that my team has done to score 5 game pieces should be erased by one robot that didn't score any tubes and put up a minibot? Something's not right there.