2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[Robby Unruh]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Commercials during webcasts

Unfortunately those are from the website hosting the stream. FIRST/the webcaster has no control over this. BUT, you can install AdBlock (Google Chrome extension) and it'll get rid of those pesky ads and more.

Originally Posted by MARS_James

Unless the robot is in danger of hurting someone no one (volunteer, ref, safety personal, Dean, Woody) should touch your robot our your cart without your teams permission.

I feel like this needs to be in writing somewhere. Our team had this happen this season and it was completely unacceptable. We were lucky that our robot did not fall.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Robby Unruh

Unfortunately those are from the website hosting the stream. FIRST/the webcasters has no control over this. BUT, you can install AdBlock (Google Chrome extension) and it'll get rid of those pesky ads and more.

Does Adblock really take care of those? I guess we never installed it at our shop.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Does Adblock really take care of those? I guess we never installed it at our shop.

It does; with Ustream, I never see a single ad.

[IndySam]

The Game: I must say that this might have been one of the hardest games for refs this year. I saw refs that I know and trust struggle at times. To many ambiguous rules left to many things open for the head ref to interpret. Also the nets caused sight line problems that were difficult to overcome. The GDC really needs to put more thought on how the game design effects the refs.

Real Time Scoring: need I say more than what's already been said.

The Champs: Too many teams in each division. Less teams attending champs or more divisions, something has too change. For the most part the top 8 teams are determined by luck of the schedule not on field performance. Saturday afternoon = just way to long, speeches go too long as usual. FIRST really needs to do something about this, it really ruins the finals. Seating, the way the dome is arranged there isn't near enough seats for teams during opening ceremonies or Finals. Open the upper decks or arrange the fields like Atlanta.

[EricLeifermann]

Originally Posted by IndySam

The Game: I must say that this might have been one of the hardest games for refs this year. I saw refs that I know and trust struggle at times. To many ambiguous rules left to many things open for the head ref to interpret. Also the nets caused sight line problems that were difficult to overcome. The GDC really needs to put more thought on how the game design effects the refs.

Real Time Scoring: need I say more than what's already been said.

The Champs: Too many teams in each division. Less teams attending champs or more divisions, something has too change. For the most part the top 8 teams are determined by luck of the schedule not on field performance. Saturday afternoon = just way to long, speeches go too long as usual. FIRST really needs to do something about this, it really ruins the finals. Seating, the way the dome is arranged there isn't near enough seats for teams during opening ceremonies or Finals. Open the upper decks or arrange the fields like Atlanta.

Einstein is located where it is because of the VIP/hospitality suite there isn't a good location for it on the side of the Jones Dome so they have the current field locations.

My negative for champs was that each field had a different policy on volunteers and VIPs watching the field, while on the floor, as well as each field had a drastically different proximity(just like last year though i didnt think it was a problem till this year) to the stands and robot load in/out procedure. Why can't each field be located in similar locations to the stands as Curie and Galileo and have the same load in/out procedure for the robots?


This isn't a thing FIRST did but what RI3D did. I both loved and disliked the RI3D process. I liked it because it upped the level of game play but I disliked it because it changed the game too much. What I mean by that is if they didn't do what they did, I believe that many many more teams would have been pure climber/dumpers. Would that have made the game better? I don't really know, it just would have been a different game, and I think it would have been the game the GDC designed it to be.

Overall I think this was a good game. Most people have already said my other negatives so I won't repeat.

[IndySam]

Originally Posted by EricLeifermann

Einstein is located where it is because of the VIP/hospitality suite there isn't a good location for it on the side of the Jones Dome so they have the current field locations.

Prioritizing VIP suite over 25000 team members is a terrible reason to do it. I would bet everyone who was in the VIP/Hospitality area would agree.

That suit is only good for viewing during opening ceremonies and the finals and is not crowded during either.

[Alex Cormier]

The wildcard system is good, but needs work.

Week 1 winning teams don't qualify into the wildcard system. That's just plain stupid.

[EricLeifermann]

Originally Posted by IndySam

Prioritizing VIP suite over 25000 team members is a terrible reason to do it. I would bet everyone who was in the VIP/Hospitality area would agree.

That suit is only good for viewing during opening ceremonies and the finals and is not crowded during either.

Agree 100%.

But those are the only "cushy" seats in the house and some even have tvs in front of them so people with bad eye sight can still see the action.

Not saying it right or wrong just showing why they do it that way.

[OZ_341]

Originally Posted by IndySam

Prioritizing VIP suite over 25000 team members is a terrible reason to do it. I would bet everyone who was in the VIP/Hospitality area would agree.

That suit is only good for viewing during opening ceremonies and the finals and is not crowded during either.

They also block off the entire second level so that the VIPs don't have to share the same level of the stadium with the huddled masses. This eliminates many available seats. I can understand insulating your VIPs from the crowd but, I thought that is what the VIP box was for in the first place.

[Peyton Yeung]

I actually liked sitting in the nose bleeds because I got a birds eye view of the field. In 2011 we sat way lower and I had a harder time seeing the whole field.

[cgmv123]

Originally Posted by OZ_341

They also block off the entire second level so that the VIPs don't have to share the same level of the stadium with the huddled masses. This eliminates many available seats. I can understand insulating your VIPs from the crowd but, I thought that is what the VIP box was for in the first place.

To be fair, the second level ("club" level) doesn't have nearly as many seats as the lower bowl ("concourse" level) or upper deck ("terrace" level).

[Kstuck]

It would be nice to have a quick way for people who are working in the pits and not part of the drive crew to get to the stands so they could watch their team matches then get back to the pits quickly.

Being on Currie and having to walk all the way out of the pits and around to the opposite side of the stadium took quite a while.

[Boe]

hate to help this thread get longer then the positives but here are a few things i noticed that FIRST could stand to improve on.

-Put a live display of the matches in the division pits
-better webcast quality if FIRST is going to grow this needs to improve
-smaller/more divisions, this one really bugged me its hard for ranking to be accurate if you only play a fourth of the teams in your division
-also more matches at champs per team
-less long dance sings between Einstein matches, put in guest speakers to save time during scoring

[Nemo]

Holding regionals in expensive arenas with expensive lighting and sound and charging $9000 for two events is a bad model that stunts FRC's potential to grow. Put events in high school gyms with fewer teams per event. Make it possible for every team to attend two events for their initial $5000 registration fee. Zondag says it better than I do in his FIRST in Michigan district system FAQ.

The excessive speeches on Einstein are a huge gaffe that they keep repeating every year. Find different way to honor and thank our generous sponsors that are not counterproductive. Bombarding students with speeches is quite ineffective. At least make them really short and sweet - they are not supposed to be keynote speeches, are they? Or limit the number of speeches to ONE or TWO. And as much as I respect and admire Dean Kamen and all of his contributions to society, his quiet manner of speaking is not very energizing. I couldn't even understand half of what he was saying because he speaks so quietly.

Einstein should be shorter. Give out more of the awards at a different time such as the opening ceremonies. Maybe give out a couple more awards at the division level, or heck, give all of the awards except CA and a couple others as division level awards. For the time slots that need to be filled between Einstein matches, how about some compelling videos? I think a well made 1-2 minute video can be more effective at delivering a message to high school students than a speech by the CEO of a company.

Let's get rid of the 6 week build season (also discussed in Zondag's FAQ). We built these robots in 6 weeks... except we didn't. It took my team the whole time leading up to the Championship to get our robot to where it ended up. We used the withholding allowance and installed stuff at each event. It is pointless to make us bag it and work on a practice robot - it simply consumes a bunch more resources and slows us down some. I think the attachment to the 6 week build season is mostly sentimental.

It has been a great season overall. I posted in both threads, and I listed a bunch more items in the positive thread than I did in this one. Great job on 2013. I hope FIRST continues to make some changes in places where it makes sense.

[Walter Deitzler]

One major negative thing that I am seeing is that FIRST had too many teams at champs this year, yet a major positive is the wildcard system. Yet these two have a direct correlation. How are we going to keep the wildcard system (allowing more teams/regional finalists to come) and have less teams/more competing time? I have seen proposals for more divisions, but the only way they would fit this in is if we (shudder) moved some of the divisions to the pits. Longer competing time? This means that all of the volunteers, who are already have to give up a whole lot of their time, would have to lose another day of work or school. The wildcard system was awesome, we want to keep that (but that is for another thread).
I do see the the concerns that many teams have, with the massive seeding ties and fewer matches, but I am not seeing a viable way to fix them.