Quote:
Originally Posted by lemiant
First, if anyone who participated in the special happens to read this, THANKS!!!
Now, one complain I've seen a lot of is that they don't show the matches. This could partly be put on the producers but I think you guys need to remember something:
Matches are BOOOOORING.
The GDC has a hard task creating a game that is an engineering challenge and still interesting to watch (even with the possibility of multiple robots dead on the field). In my opinion they have greatly sacrificed crowd appeal. At matches where my team was playing, or even when I was in the stands I found the matches interesting, but once I moved on to the webcasts they weren't interesting. We have too many ways of scoring which are happening quickly and simultaneously without real time scoring. This means you cannot track the whole match through a camera, at best you can watch maybe 1/3rd of it, and have no idea what is going on everywhere else. It's really not will.i.am's fault that there where no einstein finals shown. It wouldn't have interested anyone outside of FIRST.
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I have to disagree. If our sport wasn't exciting to watch, it wouldn't have gotten anywhere over the last 20 years. It would take good camera work to make it suitable for TV, but then, so does any sport. If you want to see what good camera work and presentation can do for FRC, watch the Michigan special from this year.
Yes, some matches are slow, due to unresponsive or ineffective robots. Yes, some years the game is easier to follow than others. But every year I've been in FIRST, matches played by top-level teams have been thrilling to watch, both for me, and non-FIRST friends. I've gotten a lot of people involved by bringing them to competitions. And they come back because its exciting.
And in response to earlier comments about nit-picking, I want to clarify that I absolutely mean this as constructive criticism. I thought the special was GREAT, and am THRILLED that FIRST has gotten this kind of exposure. I'm even more excited that this looks to be an annual thing. But we can't just play the same special each year. We need to top ourselves, and draw even more people in. And I think that further illustrating the excitement of a competition could help