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Originally Posted by Cory
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.
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.
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.
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I think people know not to hit anyone in the loading zone, but there are accidental hits, due to visibility, or not seeing the robot is "in" the loading zone, or because of close proximity of the loading zone to a corner goal where it's tighter to maneuver, for example. And after the late G15 rule change, it made it more possible to draw a penalty when technically you weren't loading a tetra.
It's good to hear that rules were at Nationals - hopefully they are available at regionals in the future. I think the separate Updates should also be available, as there was an issue with the full G15 update not being incorporated into the rules correctly, which caused an issue at at least one regional. So if that happens again, there could be issues. I think refs need to be more familiar with the rules and Updates than teams are, and that hasn't been the case in some situations.
I didn't intend for CD to be the official game release decisions, but they could be providing feedback, or acknowledge there are issues they are working on, so that people don't feel as if they're making suggestions or asking questions that go into a black hole. It's tough to be arguing back and forth over something, and not have any clue whether or not FIRST is addressing it or even know that it's a concern. If there were FIRST officials that were to be active, it could possibly be a moderated section so they don't get attacked, but they shouldn't shy away from good debate or arguments on topics.
Perhaps instead of being active on CD,
FIRST could implement a "suggestion" system, similar to Q/A, where we can all post these ideas directly to them, and they can respond with some sort of feedback. But is there somebody from FIRST that knows I'm making this suggestion and to possibly consider it? I think there needs to be a way where people can get feedback directly from FIRST for improvements. If FIRST isn't willing to accept the suggestions and perhaps act on some (which I think they would), then we have a problem. But we need to know that FIRST is hearing us.
I agree on silly questions - I am amazed at some of the ones I read on Q/A. Maybe FIRST should moderate the Q/As for ones that are blatantly answered in the rules. I have never received an answer via email from Q/A even though it says I will, so maybe they can start using that when silly questions are asked, and reduce the number of Qs everyone else has to read through. Some say "no question is a stupid question", and I agree to an extent - just please read the rules first!
Well, some of this may have gone off topic a little. Sorry.