It was great to see familiar faces and meet some new people at this year's GRITS competition. It was a day filled with stress excitement, lots of robot repairs, and some hardware. First, i'd like to thank 2974, 2415, and 4941 for being great alliance partners, and especially to 2974 and 2415 for putting faith in us despite us showing less than glamorous results in qualifications. We actually came into GRITS wanting to beat 2974 and pay them back for eliminating us in quarters both times in the season, but it was great to be on the same alliance. Unfortunately, our robot went out of commission for most of the elims after the first match, and I'm sorry that we could only contribute to the strategy discussion after that point. Next time we meet up in Peachtree, we'll be prepared and ready to play our hearts out.
Overall, the event went kinda rough, and there were some good points, but there are also some points that could be improved. First, what was good:
- The venue was spacious, and we weren't yelled at for taking our robot and testing it in empty spots in the venue
- There was plenty of time between matches for repairs and tuning
- The trophies are kinda cool. I didn't like last year's trophies as much.
What can be improved:
- Match schedules came out way too late. Our team was in the first match, and we found out right after opening ceremonies. We were still testing our robot and configuring it with the field at this point. It would've been nice to know what matches we were in earlier.
- It's really one of the game's follies, but the reffing was, to put it nicely, not great. To give an example, we scored all of our team's missed auto balls, and we threw a ball in to start a cycle, but the refs said we still hadn't scored out auto balls, and wouldn't count any truss or assists on the ball in play. We were also told by the head ref to throw balls that were shot out of bounds in auto, back into play, instead of waiting to throw them into a bot. Point is, reffing NEEDS to be improved.
- Rankings. Rankings weren't up until the last stretch of qualification matches. Sometimes match strategies depend on who is ranked where.
- The match organization. The eliminations didn't need to take so long, but almost every match our alliance played in took forever to score and half the times the scores were redacted or under dispute.