[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Jack Jones

If there was no advantage to knowing beforehand, then why did they need an NDA?

Those are completely unrelated, and again, the NDA doesn't stop teams from revealing anything that gives us an advantage. It's honestly more of an "agreement to disclose at this time".

Some make it sound like knowing early was a disadvantage. Was the NDA in place to keep them from misinforming the rest?

If you don't know, why are you alleging that the NDA is somehow designed to stop you guys from knowing stuff about the game that we get to know?

Was the “when” in the NDA an arbitrary date, or was it when the test team demonstrated proficiency? Saying that the test teams had more problems than others suggests it was the former, and is not much of an endorsement for beta testing.

I don't have it in front of me right now, so I can't say, but no, beta testing is not something that should be done by a team looking for an "edge". The feedback given was very useful to FIRST.

In my opinion, information delayed is information denied.

You still got everything we knew, before the game came out. My team hosted a webcast AND went to Illinois and Indiana to demonstrate all of what we learned. Us having it for a slightly longer amount of time did not give us an edge in any way as it's not like we could do anything with the information about the control system before the game came out. Even if it was the same control system.

But giving select teams the system early is not the only reason I’m against it.

Again, we don't get the system early. We get a different system, which we have to return to FIRST. We get the system at the same time as you.

I’m against it because it’s a very poor replacement for having the right information provided by the experts who designed the system and who’ve work out the bugs in the actual environment.

The NI people aren't "passing the buck". They supplied tons of information to teams, including my own and others during the build season. We're merely trying to make sure as many people as possible learn as much as possible, as efficiently as possible.

I’m not saying that the beta test was worthless. Who knows, maybe we’d still be trying to finish week one with out it? What I am saying is that should not be unnecessary. Give us a good system and we’re capable of figuring it out. We do it with the game design, the KoP, and all the rest without knowing before kick-off. The control system should be no different.

OAO

We're not trying to "figure out" the control system. The beta test program does not exist to inform 16 FIRST Robotics teams on the control system. It's just that, a test. We have to set up things and find out how they don't work and how to fix them, then we give these details to NI for the final control system. As we've said repeatedly, any knowledge we get, we share, and a lot of it became obsolete anyway...

For "proof" we didn't have a massive advantage that let us crush the competition, if you really want to know, we spent the entire first regional we attended attempting to implement working camera tracking. Our team beta tested the camera. In fact, other than an intake roller, the only failures on the robot were programming related. It's a big part of why my team's IRI record was 4 - 4 and not 5 - 3 or maybe even 6 - 2, actually (It was my fault, by the way. )

It's frankly a little insulting to my and every other beta test team when you make assumptions and implications about our motivation and actions when volunteering to attempt to make the transition to a new control system as smooth as possible. My team worked for 3 months on this project, then webcasted a conference on it, then drove through 3 states just to make sure as many people as possible know what we did about it. We've done everything we could possibly do to ensure we didn't have an advantage (this was before learning we didn't get to use the exact same system), and that has never been my nor any other beta test team's intention when doing this program.

PS: 1714's applying again.