Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom Line
I am ALSO very glad that Marjie Jenkins took the microphone and called out booing after the the second replay was announced. It doesn't matter which team in particular, but I hope the mentors on that particular team have a long talk about gracious professionalism with their members. I'm sure their students would have felt differently had they been on the other side of the field glitch.
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I'm pretty sure no one individual team was responsible for the booing, but rather a collective disappointment from a large portion of the audience. It wasn't directed toward the teams or the staff, but rather HQ itself.
I fully understand that everyone involved with FIRST gets nothing in return for sacrificing their time to make this a possibility except for the satisfaction of helping a lot of students, and I am eternally grateful each of their services. This couldn't be done without them. I myself am a volunteer, both within my own teams and at the events. But come on guys, it's week 7 already! FRC is a product that we all buy into and expect to work, and this kind of problem this late in the season is simply unacceptable. Chances are it had nothing to do with any of the volunteer staff on site; they're just doing their job the best they can. Maybe it's just because I'm getting old enough to finally noticing these problems, or maybe this is actually new, but while all the foot soldiers plod along at each event doing their jobs excellently, quality from the top of the organization seems to have declined.
I'm not mad at the GDC for some of the questionable decisions they made this year regarding the unnecessarily large responsibility allocated to the refs, or some of the penalty values (or the refs for enforcing these penalties), or even the large push toward heavy defense or 1 game-piece games, but this kind of technical failure bothers me greatly.
Keep in mind I have no horse in this race (I was completely unaffected by any of these technical failures and my teams were eliminated from Championship contention weeks ago). I just feel bad for all the alliances including MSC QF 1-1 that have gotten screwed by the the field system we were given to use. I'm just frustrated that while all the other teams are doing their best and working their darnedest, considering the pedestal lights, the hot goal timing, match length discrepancy, and now this, the FMS we were given doesn't seem to be fully debugged before being released to us for use.
disagree with me or not, these are my individual feelings. I don't know any of the facts, so I may be entirely in left field. Thank you event-staff FMS guys for working your butts off to get it fixed. You guys are troopers. This kind of problem is WAY over my level of understanding.