Quote:
Originally Posted by Ian Curtis
There is a reason airplane manufacturers don't put this switch on board to be accidentally toggled. 
I understand FIRST is in between a bit of a rock and a hard place (do they use this option to schedule practice matches?), but it seems ridiculous that the default would be to change it instead of leave it in place. As Eric said, why isn't more of this validated beforehand? Since the burden is really on Districts now, can we run more official week Zero events to shake this all out earlier?
Perhaps this discussion is a more interesting note on what CD finds important. A thread of whether you can use tape to make your bumpers look nice blows up right away, but a thread about something that actually impacts teams in a meaningful way just simmers in the background. |
I think something that would greatly benefit FRC would be to reevaluate how current Week Zero scrimmages are being run.
Our team is very lucky to have the opportunity to attend the Week Zero event with an official field & FMS hosted at Merrimack HS and formerly Nashua HS. This event seems much like a one day off season we have grown familiar with. Practice matches in the morning, three regular matches, alliance selection, and then a quick elimination bracket of four alliances and done. Teams get the time on the field and FIRST gets to see how the game is played but there is still a lot missing from it compared to a regular event. Penalties were "called" in that the refs were scoring them but never telling teams what fouls occurred and there wasn't even the guarantee that refs were looking for fouls each match. Pedestals were an issue then as well and quite possibly the hot goal problem seen by 254. Since many teams didn't have a working auto mode it didn't matter and we weren't looking for it.
A lot of the issues we have seen this year could have been "fixed" or at least recognized sooner if the scrimmages were run more like an official event. Some sort of feedback form would also benefit FIRST as teams can notify FIRST of what isn't working and what is so if one group noticed something that another didn't at least FIRST was notified.
Some issues just won't be fixed by Week Zero scrimmages being monitored more. Didn't seem like we lost 20 seconds of match time.
Lastly, FIRST needs to start taking this stuff more seriously and maybe they are just we haven't heard anything. I think its the latter part that bothers me the most because teams who attended Mt. Olive haven't heard a word from HQ and what happened there was worse than tech fouls being worth too much as they lost a lot of match play time. Frank came on board and really started to better the communication to teams but since we've seen these issues this year we haven't even heard, "We see there is a problem and we are working on it".