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Originally Posted by Joe Johnson
Is it fair to say that there are still issues but that between the experience of the teams and the field crews, things are working well enough to muddle through the rest of the season?
Is the general sense that things are getting better week to week or staying the same? Again, it is hard to see the forest for all the trees.
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I may be biased since most of the field problems in Wisconsin seemed to happen when our team was on the field, but in my opinion the performance of the scoring system in Wisconsin was the worst one yet of the 4 regionals I've seen.
I think it is completely unacceptable that because the scoring system doesn't work right that the wrong alliance is frequently awarded the autonomous "win" putting them on defense first. Playing defense first is a big advantage in this game and when one alliance (say red) scores 10-15 balls in the center goal and the blue alliance scores 1 or 2 in the lower goal (or sometimes even none!) and blue ends up of defense first it is a huge screwup. Now, even though the 10 point bonus will be corrected at the end of the match, the red team is basically depleted of balls (since they shot them all) and is now immediately on offense.
Jack Jones put up some stats from Wisconsin showing that the scoring system incorrectly awarded the autonomous "win" about 22% (!) of the time. I don't think this is acceptable at all for the Championship. Since FIRST has already given up on the idea of using the automatic counters for the official scoring anyway, they shouldn't use it for autonomous either. The system needs to be reworked so that there is a pause after autonomous for the head ref to figure out which alliance won and then allow the scorekeeper to manually select which alliance is on defense first. My understanding is that right now there is no way to override the system to indicate the correct autonomous winner.
Oh, and the fact that the entire system locks up whenever a large number of balls is scored is ridiculous! We had a match where 2 robots each scored 10/10 (a big accomplishment in my opinion) and the field couldn't handle it. FIRST is putting big challenges in front of the teams to solve and we're doing it. How come they can't build a system capable of counting a few dozen Poof balls without locking up?
Week 4 and we still have a mess on our hands.
