The 6 Week Build Season and 'Mentor Burnout'

[Bongle]

Originally Posted by Chris Fultz

but it isn't.

That's because the current ruleset permits them to. If the rules were "6 weeks, no withholding, only raw materials brought to competition, and driver station doesn't work between end-of-build and start-of-competition", then nobody would be building because nobody would be allowed to. You could work on your human player skills or talk about strategy, but that is (depending on the game) working at the fringes, rather than improving your shooter from 2 cycles to 5 cycles.

I've been in FIRST for 10 years now, and I've noticed a gradual increase (steep, in recent years) of how much building goes on between end-of-build and competitions starting. Under the current ruleset, if you want to be competitive, you also have to be doing that building (because the competition is). If you want to maintain friendships, jobs, or families, then you are essentially put in a situation of choosing to be competitive vs choosing to maintain those other extremely important things.

Put another way, you could put it this way:
-10% of teams will work to the absolute maximum of what the rules permit them to and enjoy it. Currently, that means a practice bot, 30lbs of robot withheld per competition.
-40% of the teams want to at least be competitive and have a shot at winning the competition. Therefore, they'll kill themselves trying to keep up to the top 10%. They'd work less, but in order to be competitive they have to be working about as much as the workerbee top 10%.
-The other 50% of teams probably pack it up at week 6. Some of them may be have really good robots, but many of them won't.