2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[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.

[hiyou102]

I think the speeches on Einstien went on for too long this year. Imagine if at any other competition the speeches were plentiful and went on for this long. We want to make FIRST exciting, not bore the audience.

Another thing that's already been beaten to death is that we had 8 matches. This needs to be fixed for next season. Maybe 400 teams is too many.

[xraymypanda]

The champs webcast quality left something to be desired. Even if it was not possible to broadcast in 720p with 4 fields running due to bandwidth, they probably could have gotten 720p at least for Einstein.

[bardd]

Originally Posted by xraymypanda

The champs webcast quality left something to be desired. Even if it was not possible to broadcast in 720p with 4 fields running due to bandwidth, they probably could have gotten 720p at least for Einstein.

There was a high-quality webcast on NASA's website, and it was really good... Better than Midwest's quality IMO.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by bardd

There was a high-quality webcast on NASA's website, and it was really good... Better than Midwest's quality IMO.

There was a link under the VLC/WMP stream link that was an HD flash stream. Also, the best quality stream (up until 6 PM EST) was the Ustream stream that is(I think) whatever's on NASA TV. Sadly, at 6 it skipped to the regularly scheduled NASA programming.

Also, the HD Flash stream was a few seconds ahead of the VLC/WMP stream for me-and it was definitely significant.

[xraymypanda]

Originally Posted by bardd

There was a high-quality webcast on NASA's website, and it was really good... Better than Midwest's quality IMO.

Huh, I was watching that stream for a while and it didn't seem to be much better than 480p. I figured that the Blue Alliance sourced its stream from the NASA stream. Or maybe my Internet wasn't doing too well.

[bardd]

Originally Posted by DevenStonow

Also, the HD Flash stream was a few seconds ahead of the VLC/WMP stream for me-and it was definitely significant.

I'm pretty sure they were globally 15 seconds apart.

[Bryan Herbst]

Originally Posted by Donut

The sooner we get everyone to Districts the better off all of FIRST will be. I hope they come up with a good system to handle those of us in remote areas (maybe read some of the threads on CD for a few ideas ) but I'm willing to be inconvenienced on what competitions we can attend short term for the huge economic benefits. Plus I think forcing the system may be the best way to spur growth in the areas that haven't seen it.

I wish it were that easy! Sadly, moving to the district model is quite difficult for some regions. Take Minnesota for example. We would probably be a good candidate for the district model because we have the 3rd largest number of robotics teams (I believe highest per capita). Unfortunately, we haven't really hit a high volunteer base yet. If we were to switch to the district model, we would likely have to about double the number of events we hold [citation needed], which would certainly overburden our volunteers. I'm already pushing the limits of the time I can take off work, and I know many of the other volunteers are as well.

There are a few more issues that we've run into when considering the district model here, but I'm certainly not the most qualified to talk about them. I do know our planning committee is watching the other districts closely to see how it goes.

[A. Estrella 78]

"The season ended not cool."

[A. Estrella 78]

Something to add to the webcast...
It was good up until the point Archimedes
lost audio for 30 minutes.

[Carl C]

I loved this season and this game was a lot of fun, but there were some things that need to be fixed.

First, scoring this game was really tough this year, so I am not totally surprised (though still disappointed) that there was a mistake at Einstein. Looking back at some of our own matches, I have actually found some incorrect official scores.

Second, I feel like the goals were poorly designed as many discs simply bounced out. Especially during championships, it became obvious that the chains simply could not absorb multiple shots at once or ones at slightly the wrong angle. I know at North Carolina, we ran into an issue where the chains were too tight on the red alliance goal, which caused disks to bounce off often. When we told the officials, however, nothing was done to try to fix the issue. Now I do not mean to badmouth anyone (overall, everyone involved was excellent), however, it can be very frustrating when those in charge do not even care about an issue.

Overall, this season was still a ton of fun and I hope next season is just as good if not better.

[Wendy Holladay]

FIRST Choice crashing and running out of many items, after, it seemed like day 1. We ended buying most of what we really needed and used the FIRST Choice credits on extras

[Bochek]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

Commercials during webcasts

Working on it