[magnets]

I'm not angry. I'm really sad. In the past 5 years or so, FIRST has lost so many great people like Woodie Flowers/Dave Lavery (from GDC) and Bill Miller and key members of the FIRST community like Karthik, Paul Copioli, and Jim Zondag have all expressed frustration with how the season is going. Tons of refs are unhappy. Most of the times when teams are eliminated, they leave, not happy that they're out, but they aren't really mad. This year, teams are angry and bitter because of their losses. Teams that seed first in small events are angry that they're third robot is a box on wheels, and can't beat the number 8 alliance. The combination of incorrect scoring, pointless penalties (1114 in SF in Waterloo), incorrect calling of fouls, and field issues doesn't inspire anybody. FIRST's survey (that they used to convince themselves they hadn't failed) doesn't accurately represent the quality of the game. If you went to the Olympics, and 10 countries didn't place in an event because of a scoring issue, then it wouldn't be a very good game, even if the other 100 countries all thought it was fair.

I am super, super frustrated about a few issues. Making major changes to the game at this point would only make people more upset. However, the lack of fixes for the field is just unacceptable.

We payed many thousands of dollars to put up with the incompetence of the FMS developer. Creating a device which turns on one light for 5 seconds, and then another light for 5 seconds is really simple. So is turning on a colored light when somebody pushes a button. If FIRST doesn't have the resources to do this with the over complicated field system, then use a light switch or a simple timing circuit. Expecting one second accuracy for a timed competition is not unreasonable. I had the opportunity to use a referee tablet this weekend. It is awful. I pity the refs who put up with them. There is a several second delay on the tablet for the screen to respond, an additional delay for the green dots on the field video display to appear, and an additional 10 seconds for the goal lights to turn on.

The tablets worked just fine in 2011, 2012, and 2013. Why did they have to ruin them this year?