I must say that what I've heard about the Israeli regional is simply pathetic. Towers there weren't built per the legal dimensions - making functional hangers dysfunctional - bumps weren't the right size - semis were decided by a coin flip :facepalm: - etc. The soccer balls used there weren't even the specified soccer ball (
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/img...40212523_l.jpg) - they were Nike soccer balls donated by a team (at least that's what I heard). Here's a thread, written by an Israeli team mentor, that details just some of the many problems there:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=84605.
My personal complaint is that FIRST personnel seem not to abide by 'Gracious Professionalism' when it comes to possible mistakes on their part; their motto for such occasions seems to be "It has never been FIRST's fault, it is not FIRST's fault, and it cannot be FIRST's fault. End of story." I don't mean to come across so harsh, but...
At the New York regional - during an elimination match, but I'm not sure which - the field system had to be rebooted. Prior to doing so, we were instructed to close the lid on our Classmate. However, as many people discovered throughout the season, letting your Classmate start sleeping whilst the Cypress is connected leads to the Classmate not recognizing the connection to the Cypress, and consequently a person not being able to use any switches wired through the Cypress - in other words, letting your Classmate sleep while it's connected to the OI has the potential to kill everything on your OI that is not a joystick/controller. When the referees instructed us to close the lid, we immediately pointed out this glitch, and they didn't retract the instruction; we were, however, allowed to leave our Classmate open.
One of our batteries had also been wired improperly - the terminals had been reversed, inverting the current - and this (probably) caused us to fry our analog breakout. We quickly replaced it, and when we found an opportunity to, we talked to the NI representative about it. Much to our dismay, we found out that a third-party manufacturer is licensed to produce the analog breakout, and consequently, we were unable to definitively determine the root of the problem in our fried breakout (although reviewing the circuit map of the breakout, we did find that the most probable cause was the frying of the 5v power supply on it, since that had visible internal damage). It wasn't a problem of much importance, but it would have been nice if there was someone that we could actually talk to about what the problem and its cause was.
At the Hartford regionals, we had field connection issues - I only found out during quarters, since I was in the pits the majority of the time - and it turned out that one of the driver stations on our half of the field had been inconsistent for a while, and that totally messed up our play. We ended up holding our own for a few matches in the quarters, with just one or two active robots (an alliance member's bridge connection had come loose) - and if not for bad ref calls, in conjunction with the field problems, we definitely would have made it to semis.
At Nationals, we lost communication during one match because a volunteer insisted on untethering our robot from the practice field and we didn't check to make sure that he plugged the radio (wireless bridge) back into the cRIO properly. We came out of that match panicking, and then we see the loose wire. I mean, honestly.