[Kpchem]

Originally Posted by Conor Ryan

Would would be the ethics of calling this a Arena Fault and replaying? Especially if teams and at least one volunteer agree

Originally Posted by 2015 FTC Manual

<G14> Matches are replayed at the discretion of the Head Referee and only under the following circumstances:
a. Failure of a Field Element that was likely to have impacted which Alliance won the Match.
b. Loss of control of a Robot due to a VERIFIABLE failure of the tournament-supplied FCS computer, FCS software, USB Hub, or Gamepad that was likely to have impacted which Alliance won the Match.
c. Loss of control of all four Robots due to a failure of the Field’s wireless router that was likely to have impacted which Alliance won the Match.

G14 clearly lays out the conditions for a replay. The term "Arena Fault" is not used. There is no clause under the rules to replay a match for a wrong call. The call is simply corrected if the referees agree that the initial call was wrong.

Originally Posted by nrgy_blast

This is where this discussion has headed for me: change the manual! This has gotten ridiculous enough, and FIRST can do better in the future than they have in the past.

What would you change in the manual? Simply removing the clause the prohibits video, images, and media from being used in discussions with the referee?

The problem I have with this is the amount of overhead it adds. Ignoring the costs that official review systems bring upon organizations because that has already been addressed earlier in this thread (and because some could argue that having the teams do the video reduces the cost), the amount of time overhead could quickly become a huge problem. How other major organizations solve this problem is by only giving teams a certain number challenges (the NFL gives each team 2, in the MLB it varies between the game type but it's generally 1-2 per team per game). However at an FTC event, there are many, many teams. I'm going to run through a hypothetical scenario for a 40-team event.

Let's say that, under this system, each team gets 1 "challenge" where they can use video evidence in their arguments with the referee. So the team very calmly approaches the question box and talks to the head referee raising their points. Because of the nature of video evidence, the head referee will need to spend ~3 minutes looking at it, examining it, replaying the video while consulting with the referees involved with the call, and then making a decision. Now let's assume that every single team has an issue with a call made by the referees at some point during the event. 40 teams * 3 minutes per review adds an extra 2 hours to the event. 2 hours that aren't built into the schedule, and cannot be planned for. That's a huge amount of time and if it had to be built into the budget would severly cut into match playing time for teams, because events should not run 2 hours behind schedule.

On top of that, referees catch enough flak as it is for calls that they make, and opening them up to video review would likely only make this worse.

I understand that FIRST is for the teams and that it is important to get the calls right, but a system like this is incredibly hard to implement successfully.

Originally Posted by Nemo

I had a chance to referee an FLL event this year and thought the conferences at the end of the matches were great. The teams and referees go through the scoring chart and verify that it's right at the end of each match. Teams walked away from the matches knowing what deductions were made and what they got credit for, and the students corrected my inevitable mistakes.
...

I know this is done at some events, and I think implementing it as a standard across FIRST would do a lot towards preventing situations/misunderstanings like this from occurring again in the future.