2013 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[Pat Hart]

FIRST compares the competition to the sports world and Einstein is the Super Bowl of the mind. With this thought, the matches on Einstein should be the most approachable and entertaining matches for the general public. However, the long delays between matches remove the excitement and tension of the moment. The result is a series of matches that become tedious for outside viewers.
A reason sports are entertaining is the tension created by the pace at which things happen. It is difficult to sustain the excitement for eight 2 minute matches across 4 hours. To change perceptions and culture the matches need to remain exciting for viewers across all backgrounds.

[coalhot]

Originally Posted by Pat Hart

FIRST compares the competition to the sports world and Einstein is the Super Bowl of the mind. With this thought, the matches on Einstein should be the most approachable and entertaining matches for the general public. However, the long delays between matches remove the excitement and tension of the moment. The result is a series of matches that become tedious for outside viewers.
A reason sports are entertaining is the tension created by the pace at which things happen. It is difficult to sustain the excitement for eight 2 minute matches across 4 hours. To change perceptions and culture the matches need to remain exciting for viewers across all backgrounds.

They should run two "Einstein" fields!

[pntbll1313]

Originally Posted by Pat Hart

FIRST compares the competition to the sports world and Einstein is the Super Bowl of the mind. With this thought, the matches on Einstein should be the most approachable and entertaining matches for the general public. However, the long delays between matches remove the excitement and tension of the moment. The result is a series of matches that become tedious for outside viewers.
A reason sports are entertaining is the tension created by the pace at which things happen. It is difficult to sustain the excitement for eight 2 minute matches across 4 hours. To change perceptions and culture the matches need to remain exciting for viewers across all backgrounds.

I agree with this. As a first time viewer of champs in person (I watched online in the past but was lucky enough to qualify this year ) I was able to see how unengaged the students in the stands became. I personally still enjoyed every minute of being there but had to remind students around me to do the same. Many seemed to be more focused on their phones or making paper airplanes by hour 3. After the last match had been played people immediately stood up and started rushing out to get to the last hour of the Finale that they had paid so much money for. Before the confetti had fallen teams were already out of the stadium. I know Einstein has the most viewers and it makes sense to announce all of the awards, hear important speakers, and give the most important messages. There just has to be a better way to condense it. The huge delays in between matches completely lose interest of the students, even if Gangnam style is being played during that break haha.

[Anupam Goli]

Originally Posted by LedLover96

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.

Just get rid of the waitlist. Wild cards can stay; with wild cards in play, I believe we had 378 teams qualify for championships. Let's leave it at that.

[Oblarg]

Someone really needs to reign in Dean Kamen's speeches before they cause the whole friggin' event to run two hours late. His first speech during the opening ceremonies was a great, touching speech. His speech before the final matches, however...ugh, that was terrible. The fact that you couldn't understand 80% of the words in the upper-level stands didn't help.

The field to the right of Curie (can't remember which that was) had use of the actual field speaker system for its award ceremony, and Curie did not. The result was that, as both award ceremonies happened simultaneously, it was nearly impossible to hear anything said for any of the Curie awards.

Did anyone at all think through the logistics of transportation to/from the finale? Christ, that was terrible.

Also, giving out awards between every single match on the Einstein field is a horrible idea that did nothing but try everyone's patience. They don't do this at regionals, and no one complains about the regional award ceremony procedure. Why do it at championships?

All that negativity aside, championships were a blast, and I truly hope to get back there in the near future.

[iv597]

Hmm. This will be a bit of a rant I guess, but most of my complaints were larger items overall. This being my first season, perhaps I just haven't been around enough to appreciate the smaller issues

- For lack of a better adjective, "better" webstreams overall, to get to a larger audience of lesser-dorky folk (read: people like my mother). I've seen some events on Youtube which were streamed in very much an ESPN style, with some volunteer announcers + between-match commentary, fancy scorekeeping, interviews, etc. I'm aware this would cause a manpower issue, but it'd still be nice to have if we stirred up enough demand.

- Faster match resets with less clunky live scoring. I don't really get why bins were chosen over, say, a coin-slot system here. The weights seemed to have nothing but problems, whereas a mechanical switch would be much more reliable. The only plausible reason I suppose is space to get a return pipe for any slots made for counting. And resets... wow. A match every 10 minutes (or more) isn't a great way to keep energy going.

- On the energy note... a little less time spent between Einstein matches would be nice. While there does need to be time for sponsors and awards, I think speeches between almost all QF/SF matches was overkill. Why not run through Chairman's and EI and similar between QFs and SFs, and GP, EE, etc. between SFs and Finals? Longer bunches of speeches, yes, but would make the actual match structure more fun to watch in my opinion.

- An extra day of CMP would be fun, too. Not just in the "cool, more time around dorks just like me!" sense, but in the "can we please play more than 8 matches?" sense. As a scouting application developer (IPA from #3138) I have to admit it's sometimes a hindrance to only have 10/11 matches at a regional to average out with, let alone 8 at Worlds. Also, as was noted above, not playing over half the teams in the division at CMP is a bummer - with 8 matches, assuming you never duplicate teams, you're playing with/against 40% of your division. Yikes! Compare that to 3138's two regionals this year, at Crossroads we saw every team there if I'm recalling correctly, and at Queen City we saw all but about 10 I believe.

- A flame-inviting complaint I'm sure, but the WiFi war really needs to end. I understand the issues with Einstein last year, however if I read right the Rev. B DLink was to fix the deauth attack issue, which was the issue as far as I recall. "Interference" is a pretty simple fix - run the robots on some 5GHz channel way out in uncommon territory. However, I'm also of the opinion that routers do a pretty darned good job of eliminating cross-talk, and as such the "please shut down your hotspot" bit is probably unnecessary. A related side note, having FTAs walking around the stands with the sensors was... interesting. I understand there were FTC fields having issues, however (ignoring my rant about WiFi radios above) patting me down with the little triangular sensor like they were the TSA as I apparently looked suspicious enough (and was within the general vicinity of an iPhone hotspot) was interesting if not a bit awkward (there wasn't even a shared laugh afterward or I'd have thought he was just messing around...) Again, I might be only eclipsing the scope of the WiFi issues, and if anyone'd like to enlighten me a bit more on this one, I'm all ears.

Overall a fun first year for me, even with these few complaints.

[zzzag]

Something I haven't seen so far on here...
Why must regional events operate on a Thursday-Friday-Saturday schedule (or Fri-Sat-Sun in NYC)?
While waiting for my team's week 6 regional, I enjoyed watching the webcasts on Friday and Saturday, but for the rest of the week all there was to do was read threads here on Chief Delphi and occasionally meet with the team. And on weekends where two of the teams I wanted to watch were competing in eliminations? Most of the time I ended up going with the higher quality webcast. I also would have liked to see webcasts from the weekend we competed, as a lot of exciting regionals were scheduled for that weekend.
I understand that many mentors can only get the two days (if that) off from work, but why must we have ALL of a week's events running at the same time?
What if we made some events Sun-Mon-Tues?
Even if we assume we can't get fields turned around and moved to a different venue overnight, something like Minnesota's two regionals in the same building simultaneously could be done back-to-back. This would certainly lend itself to the district setup, as two smaller district events could be run back-to-back in places like New York City, to name just one.

tl;dr: Sun-Mon-Tues regionals in addition to Thurs-Fri-Sat

[runneals]

Originally Posted by Donut

FIRST needs to stop using custom/rare game pieces. There have been a few games where it would have been easy to use a standard size, readily available game piece without needing to tell the suppliers about it and they've gone to custom or hard to find ones every time (this year stands out in particular).

I would say this year's game piece concept (frisbee) was pretty decent, but I must agree that they could have gotten it standardized. If Wham-o "sponsored" FRC this year, they could have used one of their brand name ones that anyone could easily pick up at the store. However, the nice thing with these custom frisbees is that each graduating senior (high school) member and (college) mentor received a signed frisbee. But overall, I do agree.

[Gregor]

Originally Posted by zzzag

Something I haven't seen so far on here...
Why must regional events operate on a Thursday-Friday-Saturday schedule (or Fri-Sat-Sun in NYC)?
While waiting for my team's week 6 regional, I enjoyed watching the webcasts on Friday and Saturday, but for the rest of the week all there was to do was read threads here on Chief Delphi and occasionally meet with the team. And on weekends where two of the teams I wanted to watch were competing in eliminations? Most of the time I ended up going with the higher quality webcast. I also would have liked to see webcasts from the weekend we competed, as a lot of exciting regionals were scheduled for that weekend.
I understand that many mentors can only get the two days (if that) off from work, but why must we have ALL of a week's events running at the same time?
What if we made some events Sun-Mon-Tues?
Even if we assume we can't get fields turned around and moved to a different venue overnight, something like Minnesota's two regionals in the same building simultaneously could be done back-to-back. This would certainly lend itself to the district setup, as two smaller district events could be run back-to-back in places like New York City, to name just one.

tl;dr: Sun-Mon-Tues regionals in addition to Thurs-Fri-Sat

This is actually a neat idea that I've never read anywhere before.

[fb39ca4]

Originally Posted by CalTran

This may not be something easily fixable, and probably not a problem for other people, but for those of us on the upper concourse (the 400 section nosebleed seats), the lights scaffolding for Einstein is placed exactly so you cannot see the score.

In addition, don't leave teams waiting to get to the seats. There was a mob of people that just swarmed around the Edward Jones dome staff trying to prevent them from going there.

[EricH]

Originally Posted by Gregor

This is actually a neat idea that I've never read anywhere before.

I think there's a reason for it.

Let's assume that field transport isn't an issue (say you're running back-to-back regionals in the same building, don't bother tearing down the field).

First, for many many people, Sunday is a day to go to church, and they can't go another day. (Saturday is also out for a number of people, though a rather smaller number unless you're attending the Israel Regional--which is held Sunday-Tuesday or Monday-Wednesday, I forget which.)

We'll assume the the second possible reason--Monday "here's what you need to work on this week" meetings/assignments for both mentors and students--can be worked around, though that could be an issue.


But the #1 reason not to use that schedule is...

NO spectators! That's right folks, if you run an event Sunday-Tuesday, the spectators are most likely to come on PRACTICE day! And we all know how awesomely inspiring it is on practice day, with one or two robots at a time thinking about moving or testing out their new doohickey that manipulates the whatsit or interacts with the whodijingle. Eliminations are where the excitement is--imagine no non-FIRST-affiliated spectators showing up for finals.

And if we're trying to inspire people, and get them involved, having your most spectator-friendly day be on a day when most spectators have to go to extra effort to come is not going to help.

[Oblarg]

Also, the pyramid was an obnoxious field element; it was prohibitively difficult to built an accurate mock-up of the corner, you needed access to a skilled welder and metal shop, which is not something that all teams have or can easily obtain. If a game element cannot be accurately simulated for testing with means available to the bulk of FRC teams, it should not be on the field at all. End of story.

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by EricLeifermann

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?

When We arrived on Thursday we saw that Curie and Archimedes were very close to one another at one point causing a huge pinch point that would have made it very difficult to que teams. So I worked with Dave Ferrreria and Marin Kobin to come up with a solution that would help both teams flow in and out of their fields more easily. In order to do that we had to have both fields flow in opposite directions to one another so the pinch point could only be used as an exit much like a freeway on ramp.
We did not get the opportunity to help Becky(her last name slips me at this early hour) with her Galileo setup and the first thing I noticed was they lost their back alley I had last year when I was running the field that allowed teams to que up on the blue side and use that gate and they were only able to use one gate to get in which slowed them down alot.

[karomata]

I know that we rarely get any useful information from game hints, but this year the game hints were very very random, and I dont think anybody learned anything from any of them.

[Sam390250]

Originally Posted by 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.

I actually think this is a terrible idea. When funds were getting low at the Wisconsin Regional and there were ideas of downsizing it to a college gym, I shuddered at the thought! There is something so awe inspiring about being in a huge arena, running robots instead of watching someone playing sports. Seeing the huge event just for robotics was so inspiring to me when I was a young freshman, something that could only be topped by attending the World Championship in Atlanta.

Since so few teams get to attend the World Championship, (and everyone seems to want to continue downsizing that number) if you start just holding events in dinky gymnasiums, all that inspiration goes away. While attending more events like the district system for a lower cost is a really great idea, I think bringing down the magnitude also reduces the impact of FIRST around you. Instead of helping it to grow, I think you are impeding growth by having FIRST events wither away from large, very public venues to small high schools that are in all probability off the beaten path and not nearly as inviting to outsiders who we are supposed to be attracting to FIRST.