[FTC]: The View of Penalties in FTC vs. FRC

[Monty Python]

I'm interested to get people's thoughts on this because I think there's a pretty significant schism within the two communities. Allow me to preface my post with my acknowledgement that both approaches have their merits and that while I definitely have my preference as to the way I prefer to see the game played, I don't mean to criticize those who don't adhere to it.

In FRC, the mindset seems to be that penalties exist for a reason. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the general mindset seems to be that strategic acceptance of penalties is totally fine. If you can gain more by committing a penalty than the penalty costs, you should do it, and the only things a team can never do are the things that are expressly banned.

In FTC, it seems to be a much different story. In FTC, the mindset appears to be one where the penalties are rules with a sort of moral authority, to be obeyed regardless of whether it's more strategic to break the rules or not. I recall someone mentioning that they viewed 40 point penalties as things the GDC never wanted you to do.

My old team always took what we deemed the FRC view, of taking penalties whenever it was strategic to do so. For example, in last year's game, had we come up with an efficient way to do it, we were more than prepared to latch onto the rolling goal briefly before the end game in an attempt to better line up with it in an attempt to score more batons. We were unable to come up with a way to effectively do it, but that doesn't change the fact that our mindset was always to follow the rules to the strict letter of the law with little to no regard of the spirit.

I'm curious as to what other people and team's views are as it applies to both strategically breaking rules as well as playing the game more aggressively considering my team's view was always to take every advantage possible without breaking any stated rule. Let's say a team is ok with breaking a rule and taking the penalty, would that same team be ok if they could gain a strategic advantage and possibly win a tournament by aggressively harassing a superior offensive robot, pushing them all over the board and preventing them from scoring?

As stated previously, I would say yes, take every advantage possible within the rules, that's why the rules exist. Trying to guess at the intent of the GDC was, in our opinion, useless. The only thing we know for certain about what the GDC meant was the letter of the rules they wrote down and the amendments to the rules manual they published post facto. Trying to play the game itself consistently with GP meant, to us, taking every advantage possible to win a match while simultaneously doing everything possible to help other teams and raise the level of competition all around off the field. On the field however, we were going to do our best to win and we hoped other teams would do the same.

tl;dr, what are people's opinions on trying to play matches according to the strict letter of the rules vs whatever they deem is the intent of the rules?

[jasonbrooks]

I have to agree with the FRC view on penalties. The most important thing to consider when preparing to win a game like Bowled Over is that ranking is not only determined by Qualifying Points, but also by Ranking Points. Even if you win each of 5 matches during game play, this doesn't mean that you will be ranked first if another team has a higher score from teams that lost to them.

For example, lets say I happen to win all five matches and get my 10 qualifying points. There may be 4 or 5 other teams that also do that at any given competition. However, if those teams won to teams who also had high scores, they get more ranking points.

We, at one point during this season, considered scoring points for the opposing alliance. Why? To get more ranking points. If we are certain that we are going to win (for example lifting a crate up 10 feet while the other team hasn't even attempted to get a crate), we may consider bringing their bowling ball up the ramp. Even though this may seem foolish, it is inadvertently helping our team significantly. We may also consider going as far as to help score balls in an opposing alliances crate. If we know that we get, for example, 350 points for lifting a crate 11 feet in the air, it doesn't matter if we score for them 100 points my mass depositing balls into crates for them (pending enough time of course).

After all of that, I must say that we still do not intend on purposely getting penalties. I think its more of scoring points for them. Trying to break one penalty may ultimately lead to disqualification which would be terrible. In fact, one person on our team even joked the other day that after lifting up crates, they are going to walk onto the field to get the other teams just enough points to lose right underneath us. However, this would lead to us being disqualified.

Ultimately, it IS DEFINITELY IMPORTANT to weigh out different strategies, and one of these may be to get penalties, another may be to score for the other team. But at the end of the day, a team like ours must make sure we don't do something stupid and disqualify ourselves in the process.

[alphadog0309]

I think recently the whole idea of ranking points has sort of been defeated by games which make it essentially impossible to score for your opponent...

In GOI, you weren't able to get any of your opponents batons and therefore could not score for your opponent to give yourself ranking points, as you could in Quad Quandary!, Face Off!, and Hot Shot!.

This year is slightly better in that you can score balls for your opponents BUT those are a minority of the number of points you can score and therefore will not really help a team that is looking to gain ranking points by scoring for their opponents.

Personally i believe if losing the 40 points from a Basket Grab penalty and scoring points for the opponent is going to eventually help our ranking and possibly make us an alliance captain, I'm all for it. Penalties exist to discourage intentionally ungracious gameplay, such as "hoarding" of balls and opponents crates, and should be weighted as such strategically.

Is there an attitude difference? yes, mostly because games in FTC are so close and committing that penalty more often than not could cost the team a game. Can this be fixed? It's hard to say but personally I think it should be fixed because it discourages unique strategies. I guess the GDC has their own reasons though and naturally I will accept their judgement as being correct.

[PhilBot]

Originally Posted by alphadog0309

I think recently the whole idea of ranking points has sort of been defeated by games which make it essentially impossible to score for your opponent.

There are two aspects of ranking points.....
1) Encouraging the concept of Coopertition
2) Evaluating how hard-fought a match was.

As for 1) It's interesting to note that FRC this year has abandoned ranking points as the second-tear Qualifying points tie-breaker. Coopertation has been made explicit in the Qualifying points (cooperating on the shared bridge is equal to winning the match) and scoring in Autonomous is used as the replacement for Ranking points.

So, if FIRST's goal is to stop teams ranking higher just by scoring in their opponents goals (not really cooperating) then they have done this in FTC by reducing a team's ability to score for the other alliance (as you point out).

So now 2) becomes more significant... that is, teams that win matches get beter ranking scores ONLY if they were up against a more formidable opponent.. which to me was what Ranking points were all about: win against a tough opponent... get a better reputation....

Phil.

[alphadog0309]

Perhaps a way to promote coopertition should be some sort of coopertition rp multiplier which would enable one to receive a ton more ranking points by cooperating with their opponent. So cooperating would result in both teams receiving double the number of ranking points from that match. It would bring the focus to coopertition and not remove the increase in ranking points from beating a tougher opponent, which is the whole purpose of rp.

[PhilBot]

I think if something is called a penalty, or foul, by FIRST, it's pretty clear that it's something they don't want you doing. This isn't professional sports where it's just "a guideline".

If you start considering doing ANY prohibited action based on whether it will advance you in the game (either by ranking points, or just by foiling an opponents scoring) then you have totally missed the point of gracious professionalism and "NOT winning at all costs".

Play hard, but play fair. Un-intentional actions that cause fouls are expected... it's a physical game, but planning them as a strategy is starting down that slipery slope where the "means justifies the ends". That is NOT FIRST.

A prime example...

By the time we got to the Finals match at MD yesterday, it was pretty clear what out game strategy was:

Get crates in Auto and move them to our safe zone.
Get a ball.
Put ball in Crate, in Safe Zone.
Lift Crate very high in Safe Zone.

In our last match there was a pretty aggregious foul where an opposing team waited till we started lifting the crate (in our safe zone) and then attemped to swat it out of our grasp. They contacted our crate hard, but failed to dislodge it, and we won the match. They took a 40 point penalty.

When one of our team members approached the other team after the competition to congratulate them on a hard fought match (in general), the team member replied that they would glady take a 40 point penalty if it meant knocking us out of the top spot.

This team member knew that once we lifted, the game was lost to them, so they had planned to "risk a penalty" to force a win. This is a clear example of what FIRST least like about professional sports. If our youth learn that intentional sabotage of other business partners/rivals is acceptable in life, then we're doomed.

I encourage you all to treat penalties as what they are, prohibited intentional actions, and DON'T consider doing them for gain. It just brings everyone down in the long run.

Phil.

[TechCoach1572]

This is a long post, but it has some 'story' in it from a tournament last weekend.

Clearly the biggest potential 'hole' in this year's rule is that the amount of points incurred for a penalty is no where near the amount of points you could cause the opposing alliance to miss by comitting the penalty. The potential points for lifting are huge and perhaps the GDC didn't foresee scores this high? The GDC could have made much stiffer penalties for those behaviors they wanted to disallow ... or perhaps they did. Did they leave it in the hands of the referees by not implementing specific rules for the amount of penalties that could be assessed per unit of time the violation occurs? I don't see anything on that...

The biggest standout in the misaligned penalties is SG5. If I have it right, ripping or slamming a crate out of your opponents grasp or off their lift while the crate is fully off the ground (but out of the protected areas) will cost you 5 points. This is an action that might prevent the opposing alliance from scoring 200 or even 400 points a few seconds later.... You could take a lot of 5 point penalties before you lost as much ground as they would gain. But I don't think the rules say how long of contact constitues a 5 point penalty, do they? Is it 1 sec? How about 5 points for each 10 mSec, meaning a 1 sec touch costs 500 points? I don't know.

Perhaps the only way to enforce the spirit of their rule would be to make the rule a disqualification for that case and not points based.

Now a story from WI last weekend ...
Historical Note: Team 217 lifted a crate to seemingly 20' in WI last weekend -- what's that, like 250 points? Amazing stuff. Great team. High integrity, graciously professional throughout. They probably were only limited by the ceiling height. They righly were in the finals. On blue.

If a video of the penultimate final match of WI is ever made viewable on YouTube, watch the blue alliance (team 217), with about 45 sec to go, intentionally take the crate slamming action to keep the red alliance from making the lift for final placement of a 2nd crate that would surely have doomed them within 10 seconds.

It worked, they knocked it out and went and lifted a mile in the air and the opposing alliance didn't have time to get the crate again (due to slightly damaged robot arm from the contact?). A Championship for the blue alliance. Or was it?

After 15 minutes the score was posted as Red 155-Blue 151 with Blue coming down from 231 with 80 points in penalties. I never heard a specific ruling on what the penaties were (there could have been more than that one spot, but I'm not so sure there was.) The referees seem to have given just enough penalty to cause the illegal behavior that casued the match outcome to flip to stay the way it would have been without it. (Again, I repeat, I don't know specifically what the penalties were, so I might have that worng)

Having interacted with the members of 217 throughout the day, they seemed like gracious professionals throughout and students of high integrity. I'm guessing they may not have even realized that what they did was a penalizable action. Even so, if they knew, was it worth the chance that the penalties wouldn't equal the gain?

Really tough call as the championship hung in the balance of the decision.

I for one hope that the referees can keep intentional penalty taking out of the game by ruling with maximum benefit of the doubt to the harmed alliance. The problem is the ealrier in the match the infraction occurs, the harder it is to determine impact.

In one match, one team lowered their bowling ball arm into impaling position and took 3 attempts at stabbing our robot. This kept us from getting to a crate we were going to and by the time we got there, the opposing alliance had moved it into a bad place. Were they intentionally entagling? If we get the create it's at least 112 points more for our alliance. Were they afraid of getting 3 penalties of 40? I think not. Cant' really give benefit of the doubt that we would have gotten the crate and gotten it up properly, though.

So it comes back to the 'morality' of how you want to play. Like others that have posted out there in cyberspace, The Supposable Thumbs would much prefer to not play heavy defense (by hitting other robots) if not heavily defended. But it seems playing defense on crates on the ground should absolutely a part of it as it creates some great learning opportunities and variety in the types of robots we'll see.

[Joachim]

"In our last match there was a pretty aggregious foul where an opposing team waited till we started lifting the crate (in our safe zone) and then attemped to swat it out of our grasp. They contacted our crate hard, but failed to dislodge it."


Lucky for them, then, because if they dislodged it and a ball came out (as one almost always would in a fall from a high lift position), they would have been disqualified under <SG2> (with you in the safe zone). So their strategy was likely to fail no matter what. I am guessing they didn't realize they were risking disqualification.

[PhilBot]

You know, I've read and re-read the rules many times, but I still miss the big ones.

So... to recap:

<SG2> Removing (de‐scoring) Balls from the Low Goal is allowed. Deliberate de‐scoring of Balls from the Ball Crates while in the Protected Area or Off‐field Goal will result in Major Penalty (40 points) and a team
Disqualification.

<SG7> Making contact with an opposing Alliance's Robot or carried Crate while the opposing Alliance is in the process of Stacking or carrying Ball Crates that are located in its Protected Area and/or Home Zone is not
allowed and will result in a major penalty (40 points).


So, teams beware.... attempting to disrupt scoring in the protected zone during the end game is a perrilous endeavor!!

[TRWSHSHLX]

Part of the challenge of FTC is perform under pressured circumstances, whether the pressure comes from deliberately occurring penalty on the opposing alliance to knock your team's robot out or pushing your team's robot around.

It is much easier to prevent another team from getting control of a crate and being penalized versus having an amazingly efficient robot that lifts crates high in the air. And again, how good really is a team's robot if they can't score under defense?

INTERACTION is part of the game, and it will always be part of the game in some degree. One easy way to eliminate interaction is just to have robots run on separate fields. But FIRST doesn't do that. Why? Because INTERACTION is an essential element. It's simple to just have the alliances' run on two separate field to ensure there are NO interaction at all but that's never the case and that will never be the case because part of the challenge is to build robust, efficient robot that's capable of functioning in more than the realm of the perfect scenario. For Bowled Over! the GDC implemented the protected zone but there will still be interaction.

Now onto the morality side, in FTC (along with VRC & FRC) you have to SCORE to win. In most of the examples I saw, the teams that were being heavily defended still won, because their robots are more efficient. The defensive alliance still has to outscore the other alliance to win. Yes, occurring a penalty to prevent the powerhouse robot from scoring a lot helps, but they still have to score.

In my opinion, the best alliances that deserve to win will still come out on top. They may not have the best robot or the robot that lifts the crates the highest, but overall (strategy & robot) they are the best. As for the teams that are being heavily defended, by participating in the challenge, doesn't your team agree to the rules? The rules leave holes for defense and that principle should be included while brainstorming ideas & building the robot.

It's all part of the game, and may the best team / alliance win.