Originally Posted by dtengineering
I'll say this write up is a factual summary of rules, but strongly disagree with the bias that FIRST does a poor job of rules and penalties.
I missed the "no penalties" era by a year. I started in 2004 with "Raising the Bar" and in our team's very first match we were complete, moronic, rookies with two Bosch drill motors for our drive system, and a floppy scissors lift with floppy appendages that crossed the plane of the goal so many times that we caused our exceptionally talented partners, team 33, to lose the match.
I'll give team 33 some GP credit for taking that one on the chin, but here's the thing: we analyzed what we did wrong... which started back with not actually considering all the rules when we built our robot, and set forth to take responsibility to never have a match deciding penalty called against us, ever again.
It almost worked... I think we did get one a couple years later.
When the rules were announced, we would read the rules and design a robot that could play the game within the rules. We would also plan a strategy to play the game within the rules. We would quiz the drive team on the rules and emphasize the goal to play a clean game.
I know we didn't quite meet our goal of having a perfect record of rule compliance, and I can remember more than one time when I privately disagreed with a referee's call, but never... ever... in all the games that Jim references have I felt that I could have done a better job of writing the rules or making the calls.
Nope, the rules aren't perfect. The refs aren't perfect. But they are a heck of a lot better than I could do, and as part of buying in to FRC, I'm buying in to the rule book, too.
Perhaps my approach comes from playing a variety of sports. Basketball, hockey... none of them have perfect rule books or perfect refs. Just ask the American women's ice hockey team. Or the Canadian women's soccer team. (Do those two, match-deciding, calls in Olympic finals and semi-finals balance each other out?) Compared to other sports FRC is pretty darn good. If you think explaining an FRC game is complex, try explaining football or baseball to someone who has never seen the game before.
So I completely reject the thesis that the rules are "bad". The GDC is made up of some pretty brilliant people who do a fantastic job of coming up with a creative game each and every year. While it is easy to complain about aspects of the game, I'd have to be pretty arrogant to suggest that I could do better... and I'd be the cliche of the armchair quarterback to suggest that I could do a better job of enforcing the rules than the refs do!
Okay... maybe this turned into a bit of a rant. Everyone is welcome to have their opinion on the rules, the refs, and is more than welcome to suggest improvements. And I have no problem with people having "favorite" games, or suggesting that they enjoyed one game more than another (Aim High was my favorite). I'll even agree with the fact that there are many match-deciding penalties. But that happens in sports. Really. It does... and that's okay.
But please take into account that each year, the GDC has to come up with a rule book that will spend the next three months being picked apart by 40,000 of the brightest, most creative minds on the planet. I think they do an outstanding job of it.
Jason
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