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Unread 01-04-2012, 16:50
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Alexa Stott Alexa Stott is offline
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FRC #0025 (Raider Robotix)
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Re: 2012 Washington DC Regional

Quote:
Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday View Post
639 had a great time at our first DC regional!

*snip*

We do have a few criticisms of the event. I was trying to decide whether or not to post them, but I'll preface this with the fact that my goal is to be constructive rather than insulting:
  • Not having internet at the arena was a huge issue for our team, as our entire scouting system relies on internet access to get to our database. Tethering phones is not a good enough solution. I understand that it is a convention center, but at the Fingerlakes regional, the planning committee provides the teams with a temproray login to the RIT network. I feel like a similar thing could be planned for, with a team login to to the convention center net. In the future, we will be checking at regionals for those that have internet, and not attending those that don't.
  • On the same subject, the lack of power in the stands was an inconvenience, but definitely understandable, because there really was no way to provide power to them.
  • The refs missed or made the wrong call a more than a few times. There was an incident where, during a double balance, one of the robots fell off and was touching the barrier. Instead of counting the bots as none balanced, the team got 10 points for the one robot fully supported. We also noticed quite a few instances of robots possessing 4 balls that were not penalized. That said, the crew was great and overall did a fantastic job all weekend.

*snip*

In the neutral category, does anyone know why there were three field faults called over the course of the event? They replayed two qualification matches and a semifinal, even though it seemed to me that all robots were functional in that semifinal. Also, we noticed 1218 intermittently losing connection during the last final match. I wonder why a fault wasn't called on that one when there was such a history of them being called before?


Onwards to St. Louis! We hope to see everyone who qualified in DC in a few weeks!
RE: missing calls. I was volunteering at the event and noticed a few botched calls. As I was behind the player's station, I mostly noticed the ones happening back there. There were a few times when balls simply sat in the corral for 10-15 seconds and even a few instances of teams having more than one inbounder. I know it's hard for the refs to keep an eye on the stuff going on back there, but that was slightly concerning.

As for the field faults...a robot having intermittent connection with the field is not cause for replaying a match unless the issue is on the FMS side. The FTAs are the ones who handle this. I am guessing this is why those two qualification matches were replayed--robots had connectivity issues that were the FMS's fault and not theirs. In the semifinals, the match was restarted because the red alliance clogged up their goal and shots that would have gone in were bouncing out. This also happened at times in 2006 when the field would be unable to keep up with the shots pouring into the higher goal. This was not the fault of the teams involved as the field crew is responsible for clearing the nets should balls get caught. The inability to do this in a timely fashion caused the teams from losing out on points, again, by no error of their own.
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