Quote:
Originally Posted by FRC4ME
2. Do you think an average FRC game has more convoluted rules than American football, basketball, and baseball? Not even close. Yet those three sports are immensely popular. Many - probably a majority - of spectators who watch those sports do not understand the nuances of all of the rules, yet they still seem to enjoy watching the games.
FIRST doesn't need to dumb down the challenge to make the game fun to watch.
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Well first one key difference between the rules of most sports and first is scoring.
Multiplicative scoring is absurd. It didn't make sense in 05 or 07 so why try it again now.
In every sport scoring is summation based. In basketball and football, you have the opportunity for extra points, but for the most sports your score a goal, you get x points for it.
In football, you may not understand all the penalties, or even the scoring, but you can quickly be told the goal and understand the basic idea.
Logomotion, not so much.
The problem is the way FIRST games are played. I understand the reason for autonomous / teleop / end game, but undertsanding this means to describe the basic format of the game, you have to describe 3 games each uniquely distinct, with distinct rules.
I would like to see all 3 of these incorporated into a single task making the game one game, but incorporating all of these elements, autonomous, teleop, and bonus.
I know nearly everyone would disagree with me, but end game takes away from the "game" aspect. No other sport or game has a concept of the end game. I will say that end games are very exciting for spectators, but maybe there is an alternative way of incorporating endgame in a field goal type manner. A fieldgoal / 2pt conversion doesnt break the flow of football, its not like its a completely different task than typical football play. I think having the endgame a natural extension of the game would be a cool idea. I think lunacy had something like this and overdrive did this very well. Also I'd like to see autonomous incorporated into the game, create a dead zone or something, where robots can only accomplish certain goals using autonomous, rather than having an autonomous period. Image the 2x ball in 04 only being able to be acquired using autonomous. This way autonomous would give you a distinct advantage, but during a match we wouldn't have 15 seconds of 1/3 of the robots moving. I think it would create an interesting dynamic to autonomous, that doesnt currently exist. Also then matches could be 3 minutes long, no 2 minutes with a different game at the beginning and the end.
Basically sports have crazy rules, with many outliers, but the basic idea is easy to understand, and you catch on to critical outliers very quickly. I think FIRST can learn a lot from sports, and not detract from the challenge in doing so. Also linear scoring is important too...
but knowing first, next year we'll see binary or exponential scoring
