Petition: Lower technical foul values to make this game better

[Nathan Streeter]

Having attended Granite State (week 1) as a team and having reffed UNH (week 2), I think there are some issues... but I honestly don't think G40 is one of them.

The only "issues" with G40 are that many teams just don't train their human players well enough. Honestly, most of the high-caliber teams get close to no G40 infractions... it's usually the teams that stuggle to field a working robot or hardly read the rules that consistently get G40s. G40 is serious - it's about safety and with humans that close to the field of such a violent, high-speed game putting hands in the field is serious! When the GDC relaxed G40 more this weekend to allow human hands up to the field barrier when a robot isn't nearby, I think they made it as lenient as it should be. Human Players just need to learn how to follow it!

That said, G26-1 bugs me... at both events I never saw it called on teams doing "chokehold" defense (what the rule was intended for)... every time I saw it called it was on a robot that was trying to inbound the ball. Teams shouldn't be penalized for accidental or non-strategic infractions... please change G26-1, FIRST! This was honestly a silly rule that we refs had to put a fair bit of energy into enforcing.

The fouls/tech-fouls are waaaay too high. Last year's game had similar scores to this year's (perhaps *slightly* lower)... and the fouls were 3 and 20. For some reason FIRST decided to up it to 20 and 50! I agree that 3 and 20 are on the low side, but 20 and 50 are overwhelmingly high! My recommendation: 10 and 30.

TL;DR... G40 is the team's problem; G26-1 is silly; make fouls 10 and 30 instead.