[TubaMorg]

As a mentor for a very small underfunded team, I can really sympathize with the teams that have only one shot at a single regional. Phrases like "for the most part scoring was good" and "only a couple of matches were scored incorrectly" are statistically relevent, but are poor consolation for the teams where things went wrong.

One post tried to compare teams' robot preparations (or lack thereof) with that of FIRST. Of course the comparison is completely invalid for many reasons:
1. Robots are designed and built (for the most part) by HS students in the span of 6 weeks.
2. Sponsors of these teams are aware of who/what they are sponsoring and generally sponsor the effort rather than the product.
3. Organizers of FIRST have been aware of the field design requirements for MUCH longer and are unconstrained by the rules that govern the robot build season.
4. FIRST is comprised in large part of adults (presumably mainly engineers).

Some other observations. Scoring problems seem to be a result of field design rather than any effects from robots. This is an important observation, because that means the field scoring system could/should have been tested prior to week 1 regionals. How? How could this possibly be done with all of the robots stored up in crates somewhere? Well an earlier post pointed it out: with human substitutes winging balls around trying their best to over load the system. Maybe I just don't understand the scope of the problem, though. Was the software unavailable for testing before week 1? Or was there just a general lack of desire to test the system before hand? I really must be severely underestimating the complexity of the problem, because aside from the scoring system (which seems to be the trickiest part of the problem) I'm not sure why the team scoring and ranking system is so hard? Is it networking issues? How is juggling <100 team data so hard? Can someone PLEASE explain where the "complex" comes in here? It just seems like all of the issues could/should have been tested and debugged sans robots before the first regional took place. My heart goes out to the single regional week 1 teams!