[Cory]

I still don't understand why people are complaining about penalties. How hard is it to stay the heck away from a robot that's in a loading zone?

It absolutely baffles me that after four months of knowing that you WILL get a penalty if you hit someone in the loading zone, people still haven't figured out that you don't push a robot that's loading.

As I said before, and I'll say again, it's really not that hard to avoid penalties.

It'd sure be nice to hear everyone complaining about inconsistency between regionals offer some suggestions to remedy the problem (thank you, Amy, for being constructive)

Head refs are volunteers also, not FIRST staff. You could not possibly standardize the sets of head refs across the nation. It would not be right for FIRST to ask them to devote even more time away from their jobs/family/etc. Unless someone figures out how to make 30 clones of Benge, it isn't happening. There will always be discrepancies when humans are involved.

Updated versions of the game rules were distributed to all refs at nationals. They had the team updates incorporated into the text of the rules, and important Q&A answers in the back. They also included a list of all possible situations that warranted penalties/disables/dq's.

It would be nice if FIRST officials were active on CD, but why should they want to be when volunteers are attacked left and right? Look what happened last time FIRST did something for us. They got stabbed in the back by a group of people discussing how to hack the manual.

CD is not an official medium for releasing game decisions, and any discussion on CD will not be seen by the majority of FIRST, causing even MORE issues.

also all of the peopl e that went to the drivers meeting could see how many important problems were discusses BUT none of these conclusions the refees ingeniously came up with were used when the penalities they talked about occured

- The drivers meeting was great, but it seemed like "We're gonna call these following things, for these reasons" which was all great, but the next day nothing was called!

I don't know what you saw, but I find that extremely hard to believe. In addition, to be completely blunt, a good number of questions asked at the drivers meeting were quite stupid, and made me wonder if half the drive teams had even thoroughly read the rules.

Suggestions for next year-

*Hire Dean a speechwriter. Seriously.
*Limit all speeches to a maximum of 5-10 minutes. I fell asleep twice before the finals on Einstein.
*Do the opening ceremonies Saturday, not Friday. At least play the national anthems Saturday morning.
*Do not let the opening ceremonies run late, delaying matches.
*Make sure all signage at events has the new FIRST logo (I can understand why they did not this year)
*Limit the number of people with field access.
*Work on answering Q&A questions more clearly. Many times it seemed FIRST did not give an entirely straight answer when the intent was obvious but not spelled out crystal clear.
*Similarly, to help FIRST, make sure your Q&A questions are crystal clear.
*One of my larger gripes-bring back the ability to disable robots through the scoring software By the time a referee decides a robot needs to be disabled, makes sure they have the team number right, tells the head ref, and finally slaps the E-stop, the match is over, or near to it. This is a safety hazard
*Another big peeve of mine was the fact that rankings were never shown on the field throughout the weekend at nationals, or any of the three regionals I attended, unlike previous years. PLEASE start doing this again. Having to walk all the way to the pits to see the rankings is fairly annoying, and impossible if you're volunteering on the field.