Week 1 analysis from a CSA
1. This game is the roughest game I have ever been apart of. (The carnage that is imposed on robots is quite different than recent years of FRC).
2. Lots and lots of CRIO reboots due to impact. (check all your connections on Thursday and make sure they have slack,slack and are tightly in.) Tons of teams lost comms after a hit by one, two, or even three robots. Flakey connections will not cut it this year. It can be the difference between a loss or win quite literally because you are rebooting for at least 30 secs of the match.
3. If you get into a pushing match with 6 cims behind you may trip a breaker so be weary of that.
Robot/Game analysis.
1. Penalties need to be lessened and rules hopefully should be uniform from tournament to tournament.(Matches decided by penalties always taste bad.) The amount of discrepancy between tournaments is staggering this year, but fixable in the long run of weeks.
2. The refs have the hardest job in FRC this year. They have to take care of at least three different actions while trying to make sure that robots are not committing fouls. This is just too much on them this year. I hope to see this changed so that they can make the right calls. (aka more personnel to help)
3. I for the first time do not envy anyone playing in districts or 3 regionals this year. The amount of punishment I thought the robots took last year was incredible. At this point in the game the amount of hard hits and robots falling apart is way more than I would have ever imaged for only the first week of competition. Many teams play at least 2 or more events before championships I saw great teams fall apart in the final rounds of eliminations due to the nature of the game. If this state of play keeps up they may not have much left by State or even world championships.
4. The game forces even the best scorers to actively play defence between each transfer of the ball. This allows for an almost seamless transfer of control and play. That being said, this is where the majority of the problems start between congestion, guarding, penalties, and just straight up hard defence. After watching the shut down D that was played when 188 had a chance to to win by 610 was smart. It's easy to get stuck in the mode of score, score, score.
Something I love about this game when teams work together to pull a plan off. That takes a ton of moxie and coordination.
Question: how do your think they fix the pedistool problem? That one makes me the most uneasy.
TL
R
All in all teams be safe out there. Do what you can to ensure your robot will survive this current game.