A better way to handle fouls?

[Danny Blau]

After playing this past weekend and seeing the game from behind the drivers wall (as a coach) it was wildly apparent that calls were missed and the game play was affected. G30 was the most missed call that we saw last weekend and setting this precedent invalidates 6 weeks worth of design/strategy work done by a bunch of Frisbee shooters. Many teams designed and optimized their machines to take shoots from the pyramid knowing it was a protected space.

Fouls like this and just about all seen on a FIRST field could be reviewed and corrected if the refs watched a top-down view of the field from a camera up in the rigging for the lights/projector. It only takes 2.25 minutes to re-watch a match and no field has ever been re-set and ready to go in that amount of time (they actually must give the teams 5 minutes). Reply would be harder in Qualifications but even there every match counts and every score matters.

I know FIRST is FIRST and the robot and wins/loses are a small part of the experience, but your typical high schooler hasn't been in the game long enough to experience both winning and losing at the hands of the refs.

~Danny

[Siri]

Originally Posted by DannyB3184

After playing this past weekend and seeing the game from behind the drivers wall (as a coach) it was wildly apparent that calls were missed and the game play was affected. G30 was the most missed call that we saw last weekend and setting this precedent invalidates 6 weeks worth of design/strategy work done by a bunch of Frisbee shooters. Many teams designed and optimized their machines to take shoots from the pyramid knowing it was a protected space.

Fouls like this and just about all seen on a FIRST field could be reviewed and corrected if the refs watched a top-down view of the field from a camera up in the rigging for the lights/projector. It only takes 2.25 minutes to re-watch a match and no field has ever been re-set and ready to go in that amount of time (they actually must give the teams 5 minutes). Reply would be harder in Qualifications but even there every match counts and every score matters.

I know FIRST is FIRST and the robot and wins/loses are a small part of the experience, but your typical high schooler hasn't been in the game long enough to experience both winning and losing at the hands of the refs.

~Danny

Yes, G30 (and G27 by extension) are incredibly difficult to call this year. Contact obvious from the alliance station can be invisible from other places, and violations clear from the refs' zones can look entirely legal from the drive teams' perspective. This is largely due to the 3D structure of the pyramid.

Overhead cameras could help solve a lot of these problems. I see a few challenges with it, though:

• Some events, particularly Districts, don't have overhead rigging like this. There's no cost-effective way to get the view, unfortunately.
• Referees do many other things in that time. This year - checking climbs, belaying 30-pointers down, confirming with each other, checking the new alliances' positions, contacts, discs, sometimes helping (particularly less-experienced) reset crews. At least when I ref, there's no sitting and rarely standing still between matches (barring comm issues). While some events might be able to manage incorporating this, others would be slowed down significantly. Even an extra minute per match can equate to fewer quals per team, so it's a trade-off. (The other trade-off would be getting more certified volunteers, which is no small task.)
• You are incorrect about the match turnaround time; the 5 minute guideline is only for teams in back-to-back matches. 7-minute turnarounds are not uncommon (less than 5min between matches). The average of all events' averages was 7:31 (2011, last available), and the fastest event average was 6:25. Minimum turnarounds hit around 4 minutes: essentially too short to re-watch at all. This year takes somewhat longer in general, but much of that reason employs the referees.

Honestly, I think the G30 & G27 misses are a game flaw. It's much worse than other recent games, and it's a product of the Pyramids' geometry. I realized it when we mocked up the field, but it's even worse that I'd guessed. There's just no way to see some of these things correctly (particularly when they happen in succession), and I already spend many matches I ref and coach running back and forth to try. The only solution may be for the GDC to put this in their list of specs, or test it better if it already is.