Quote:
Originally Posted by Billfred
-Aerial Assist, in pure implementation, was a great game. The robot and strategic diversity (even with all the three-day builds) was a great step up from the past few years, even Ultimate Ascent.
-Frank has done a great job of communicating with teams the rationale behind things, and apologizing when he or his staff goof up.
-Einstein was incredibly exciting, and the up-tempo presentation style was definitely no small part of that.
-The AndyMark AM14U chassis was a gamechanger. 80th-percentile drivetrain right out of the box. 90th-percentile with bolt-ons.
-It took until Einstein, but thanks to Q&A's interpretations on things like Kinects and CheesyVision the autonomous period became a chess match for the first time since 2009. As someone who remembers the great chess matches of 2006, I hope the GDC was noticing.
-4-team alliances certainly opened up possibilities at Championship.
-FRC Teams' Twitter was pretty nice this year too.
-Championship front-few-rows seating was an overall success on Curie for me.
All told, I greatly enjoyed this year.
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Since you said everything I would have thought of after a session of proper sleep that I have yet to get, I'll agree and elaborate. After the last few seasons I was left saying "I'm ready for the season to end", but this time I said "I'm ready for a new season." Sure I'm tired and after spending the last 4 months in 5th gear I'm ready to take a little breather, but this year showed a lot of positive potential for the organization. Everything people took issue with at the championship event last year was gone and replaced with far better alternatives that we will certainly see in the future. Mistakes made by people in FRC and on teams during the year have mostly fixed themselves. There were no riots at champs with this game getting under people's skin a lot more than in year's past.
But what everyone has been talking about is the game of inches we all got to watch on Einstein. Over two breaks of 5 minutes, two teams made drastic changes to the previous match's strategy to gain half seconds of an advantage in a 10 second period of a 150 second match. Watching Eisntein this year was electric, not painful. The team quality on the field didn't change, but the design of the game and the structure of the event on FIRST's part made it great. Like I said before, I think the GDC has earned another run at a game like Aerial Assist. Something that is a thrill to watch in the stands, but maybe less of a heartbreaking roller coaster behind the glass and in the rulebook.