Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Lawrence
I heard from Wil Payne that the balls were inflated to a good size.
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I said that relatively, it's a very minor issue. It's not something we encountered because we dont have a design dependent on it. However, we had a strategy depending on at least one other robot functioning in the match. Apparently I overestimated...
I can't remember or care what rank we wound up in Alamo, but I saw a lot going on in Alamo Week 1 from behind the glass. There were a lot of... interesting things happening, and this is coming from someone who was also behind the glass at a Week 1 event in NJ in 2010.
It's not worth a lot of time for me to reiterate thoughts from either the people at events or the peanut gallery watching online, but I'll add in Alamo-specific observations to some that may not be specific to the venue.
Game observations:
The adage "you're only as strong as your weakest partner": multiply the truth of that by a thousand this year. I came into the evnet trying to execute a solid strategy with teams, only to get burned by robots that did not function, drivers that didn't understand the game, and human players that DEFINITELY DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE GAME. I had to pull my human player off of the "islands" because I couldn't trust other human players to know how to look for the ball. We lost two matches because of this. If you have to pull out the rulebook and walk through with people, do it.
I don't know if this is the way things operate in the Lone Star State or will be indicative of the rest of competition, but there is no visible top 25% at events. Only 5 robots could earnestly play the game alone by themselves and win, while mid-top robots were thrown into a bind where they have to carry harder than usual.
If you want a visual representation of what kind of defense we're seeing in Aerial Assist, look
here. That is a welded piece of 2x1, .125 in thick tubing, behind bumpers, totally broken. It's astounding. The "heavy defense" or what it should actually be called "pinning without fouls" will be prevalent as long as the game official setup is the way it is.
On the topic of Game Management Systems, Friday at Alamo had a few inbounders have grief with Tech Fouls. What isn't being considered are how some referees, at least on Friday, were not moving tablets out of the inbounder zone. It's hard to get a good pass off that is legal and controllable with that in the way, unless I tell my human player to throw the ball into the tablet and wait for a glare from a referee.
EDIT: In addition, the time wasted waiting for thigs to light up can be... enraging... in a high stress situation. In a match with 118, we had to wait 3 seconds with them at the goal for the assit counts to light up properly, then another 5 to light the pedestal. Things like that are killing the flow of matches and taking control of the game out of the hands of teams and into an inefficient managment computer (not FMS, but GMS).
This game is playing mostly as expected: qualification play is decidedly painful to witness, but eliminations can be the best they have to offer. The only caveat is that for a game that relies on live scoring more than any other event I can think of, getting the live score to reflect reality is as much of a given as 4 working robots in a given qualification match.
This game has potential, but they need to make a few administrative changes and wait hope that we're seeign Week 1 jitters and not season-long issues.