Quote:
|
Originally Posted by M. Krass
Our experience has been that they are no more accurate than the upper goals.
|
I'll second that. I personally enjoyed the time that we managed to score 11 points in the corner goal during autonomous though, that was fun
As for "FIRST being broken", and not following the engineering process, I'd have to object to that. The fact is, it is MUCH harder to design a game, field, scoring system, kit bot, organize 33 regional events, work with corporate sponsors, work on obtaining collegiate scholarships, and the rest of the things that FIRST does, than it is to build a robot.
FIRST has kept the customer in mind alot more than you thought. For instance, the center couldn't have been much taller, or else it wouldn't fit in most indoor facilities, therefor limiting the amount of teams capable of constructing it properly, and able to utilize it for testing even further. In order to be able to conduct MORE testing, they would have to release the "product" (game) after kick-off, and that would generate a ton of more problems than a not-perfect center goal, or an annoying scoring system. Yeah, the scoring system sucked this year, no hiding that. Nobody enjoyed that 40 minute break we took during week 1 as FIRST attempted to fix it (except for the teams that needed to work on their robots). But it could have been much much worse. It still produced accurate scores for a majority of the matches (at least a majority of the matches I witnessed). Do you honestly think that the game would be even close to this good (however good you interpret that to be) without a significant amount of testing?
Personally, I would count my blessings. Yeah, FIRST, like anything, can always be better, but as it is now, it is nowhere near "broken". If you ask every single student who attended a FIRST competition this year to give you their comments, I doubt any more than 5% would say a word about the scoring system. Not just the students on CD, not just about their negatives this year, just ask them. In fact, in discussion with my teammates, they have said that they loved the real-time scoring so much, they would gladly tolerate the faulty scoring system to have it. It just makes the game more exciting.