Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Curtis
I totally agree though. FIRST doesn't have anything to lose in making these changes except their credibility*, and based on the reaction here it looks like they had already lost that in the eyes of many old timers.
*This is regardless of whether it was a necessary change or not (and it sounds like it probably was). It just means that participants will not trust FIRST in the future to keep to their original specifications, which breeds ill-will in any organization.
|
I am not quite as old timer as some of the other mentors and teams here but I can't remember a year where FIRST didn't make some controversial change after kick off. Sometimes it affected us, sometimes it didn't.
One thing we did take away from the years we have been here is that like a customer at a job, FIRST is just as likely to introduce scope creep and make your wonderful solution obsolete.
I feel for those that have had their strategy effected. We always discuss in our strategy meetings what are possible gotcha's for the year and as my fellow mentor said in a more inflammatory way, we did see the frisbee blizzard as a possible gotcha. Heck, we went into our current strategy with the foreknowledge that FIRST can change our scoring later, but built the best bot we could with the resources and commitment we have. I am sure the floor loaders will still find frisbees to play with.
Participating in this game reminds me of the rocket science I used to do; it has extremely high highs, but also extremely low lows. Don't lose heart and the high from overcoming an incredible challenge will help you forget the disappointments. Have fun at the competitions and enjoy the incredible machine you have spent 6 weeks building. :-)