Quote:
Originally Posted by jtdowney
Please remember these people volunteer their time for you and your students to participate in these events. If they are making a mistake I am sure it is being brought up and corrected.
You should have nothing but the up most respect for every one of them.
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I volunteer hundreds of hours of my time to assist my team in building a robot to compete with. Never mind the volunteer work I do timing race cars during the summer. I have plenty of respect for volunteer work, when done correctly. I just don't think its acceptable to hide one's shoddy work behind the front of "well they're JUST a volunteer". If we mis-timed a race, the racers would be breathing down our neck so fast you wouldn't know what happened.
While you're correct, I can't know if they're going back and fixing scores, I don't know how they could, since there's no video replay (another discussion), and the 'final' match scores they're posting on the webcast doesn't appear to have any repair built in.
It just seems to me that this year is already shaping up to be one of the worst ones as far as officiating goes, despite FIRST's attempts through 'ref training' and so forth. Between the GDC making IMO some bad calls (See: 1519 and Fezzik/Speed Racer), refusing to fix some not quite perfect (although livable) rules, and some of the bad calls we've already seen by refs (See: 1114's yellow card at MWR, not penalizing 16 for blocking them, although to be fair the GDC only recently clarified this, again.), I'm just not very impressed. I think that by basically outlawing defensive hybrid modes, they will have basically handed events to the teams with an excellent offensive hybrid, since nobody is allowed to stop them. Teams spend countless hours building their robots (and yes, i know, its not about the game, its about the experience) only to have their creativity thwarted, and be accused of 'lawyering', or get shafted by officiators who don't know the rules of the game well enough.
I've personally seen a head ref go to the rule book to check something out of the ordinary (a team last year started the match pre-stacked, and there was no rule against it, although I didn't see this incident personally.) and in my opinion, they don't check often enough.
EDIT: The original topic of this thread appears to be fixed now.