Quote:
Originally Posted by 3747Mentor
I can see trouble in this thread for us. We are fighting amongst ourselves about what teams should be satisfied with and when they should be ready to move on. Arguments are getting personal and off the subject at hand. Are we really angry at each other, or are we angry at the person who lit this candle. I think this community might be better served by expressing our outrage at the person who did this..by airing it out. I see in this thread and the Sabotage thread that was just closed that we are starting to turn it against ourselves, and I believe it is all misplaced anger. Who are we really angry at?
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I am sure that most of us are not angry at anyone. I surely am not angry. However, I am concerned that when winning becomes the only acceptable end that the value of the journey is lost. The simple reality is most of us will not win the championship in any given year.
Yes we do aspire to win. We do hope and we do the best we can to win.
Then again many of us will stop like these Einstein teams did and help each other out when it's not in our interest to make sure we win.
Unfortunately, there's clearly a much larger element of chance at work here than we seem to be able to accept as a community. I continue to see people speak of the difficulty of the best of the best teams to reach the highest echelon of competition.
I have been publicly quite pointed about the electrical issues that could impact robots since long before Einstein and long before this report. This report makes it clear that the best of our best still have problems that we've often assumed should not exist at that level of competition.
The combination of problems like the electrical issues from this report and the random uncertainty of the game designs themselves clearly makes it unpredictable that the qualities we think frame the best of the best are any assurance that they'll succeed. Hence the other awards.
The actions of this interloper aside. The uncertainty added to this environment beyond the game design is a fundamental problem that makes this all the more devastating for those most directly impacted. Surely it's an issue that adds more salt to these teams' wounds than is necessary. Even if they do everything just the same as they did this year there's no way they can be sure they'll place at that level again. FIRST's offer to promote them up to at least the venue automatically may only be slight help to them.
To use your example, we hope in the STEM fields when we compete on cost, quality and price we compete on a fair playing field. In the real world we often also compete against politics and tactics that exceed honest business.
I see a lot of frustration in this community which holds STEM values so dear to themselves that we have these uncertainties and lack of logs to find the proofs we so value. I do not think it'll turn to anger or hatred at random. Still I wouldn't fuel that fire with jokes because right now I'm sure some people still need the uneasy peace.
Clearly work needs to be done to limit the random impacts on the game play to those aspects which give opportunity for benefit to those that exhibit the traits we as a competition hold as the best example.