paper: Spanking the Children

[Joseph Smith]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

Emphasis mine.

That's the big key here, by having multiple ways to score it cuts the defense across a couple different people. In 2006 there were potentially 3 scoring robots and only 2 defending robots except potentially in the last period of play. Compare that with this year where exactly one robot is capable of scoring points for their alliance. This leaves 2 defenders on one robot by virtue of having nothing better to do.

I think the core problems with this years game stem from the lack of alternate ways to help your alliance. There are exactly two ways your robot can provide benefit to your alliance: 1) Manipulation of the ball. 2) Inhibit the opponent from manipulating their ball. Being as only one robot can do #1 the other 2 need to do SOMETHING.

3) Protect their alliance's scoring robot from defense.
I haven't seen much counter-defense played at the events I've watched, but there were times when an "inbounder" or "midfielder" robot were sitting there doing nothing while their scoring robot was getting hammered by defense. In situations like these, a bit of counter-defense could allow the scoring robot to finish the cycle and keep the game moving, where they would otherwise be blocked or keep missing shots due to defense.

[fox46]

I would postulate that back in the days before bumpers gameplay was far more violent. Today we may experience batteries sliding around and wires pulling out during impact but back then a hard hit could completely destroy a robot's frame. I remember one team with a beautifully engineered and constructed robot made of laminated maple. It was a piece of art. One hit by a fast moving machine though and it was reduced to splinters.

I don't agree with the idea that robots have increased in power. Back then you had Bosch drill motors which in themselves were up around the 500W range, CIM @ 300W, FP-0673 @ 290W, combine two or more and you are easily keeping pace with the drivetrain power of today. What has changed however are that FIRST has done away with the impossibly difficult to mount/use drill motors and given us more CIMS. With the availability of products from vendors like AM and VEX, combining three motors in a 2 speed gearbox which was once considered the holy grail of drivetrains is now within everyone's reach.

Furthermore, I distinctly remember when the "kit frame" included 80-20 Bosch extrusion and 2x4x0.125" aluminum box tubing. If anything the kit frames from today are far more flimsy than in the past. This is okay though - the inclusion of bumpers has facilitated this.

I have no problem with the speed and power of today's machines. It's thrilling to see a robot zip from one end of the field to another, deeking their opponents out and pirouetting around them at 18fps. Just don't get in it's way! Don't complain that a robot "hurt" yours when you got in their way and that it's their fault your machine is now broken. The robot who ran into you experienced just as much energy transfer and impact as yours did. Build em strong!

I truly believe the key to mitigating defensive strategies and violence on the field is all in how the game is constructed. Like preventing war between countries, the key to a peaceful civilization is that it has to be unprofitable for parties to fight. The answer here is not through the increased use of penalties. Give every robot a ball to play with and a constructive job to do aside from messing with their opponents and they'll all play nice.

[mathking]

Jason, very nice rant. Joseph I think you hit the nail on the head. So many times I have seen teams not helping their allies get free to shoot. This requires some coordination. After watching a lot of game film, we have come to the conclusion that sometimes the most effective "blocking" is to get the blocking robot to lead the way and get between the defender and the ally with the ball.

This year I have felt what I see as two distinct kinds of frustration over the game. The first is that penalties are too big (and often because the refs are toggling between pad screens too inconsistently called) so that penalties incurred by accident are changing too many matches. I completely understand that frustration. The second is the "We built a really great robot that can score well and this 'box on wheels' just keeps running into us." While I understand that frustration, I think it might well have been intended by the GDC.

Probably more than any other FRC game I have experienced, in Aerial Assist good driving and good strategy trumps a good robot. I really liked the games the last two years, but they were both games in which one really good robot could dominate most alliances. I was describing this year's game to a friend and he said "From what you said it sounds like it is how well you act without the ball that determines whether your alliance wins."

In one of our better matches, we were partnered with 4269. They were acting as the middle robot, picking up from 4306, heading to the white zone and passing to us. When a defender was near us they would give us the ball and then drive the defenders away from the side of the field giving us a clear lane to score. We got three 40 point cycles (after having to spend some time clearing autonomous balls) fairly easily this way. That match made me focus more on thinking about what the robot should be doing when it doesn't have the ball.

[jman4747]

+1 Great paper.

Hard Hits:
This field is very open so both you and whoever you run into are that much more likely to be at your top speed. Personally I'm fine with 6CIM's total being allowed, I feel it gives greater flexibility and increases robot diversity. However if you are concerned with collision speed you would need to limit max fps maybe to 10-12 or so or increase bumper thickness? I really don't know how I feel about that.

Foul Values:
Contact inside the frame perimeter, goal, whatever needs to be conditional. Why can you get a penalty for doing something that doesn't affect game play or safety? Emphasis on dose not affect. The 50pt for pinning may be changed to the current point value of a ball possessed by that robot or 20p if it possesses no ball.

Ball position and does G14 even exist?:
Possession of an opponent's ball rule and the wording of G14 means as long as you can't prove they tried to put the ball in your robot you get the foul no matter how it happened. You could loose coms because your DS crashed and an opposing alliance bot could push the ball into your robot and it would be completely legal so long as they say it was accidental. My test for a fare foul is can you literally do nothing (assuming that doing nothing does not incur a foul by it self like a G25 for example) and get a foul. G14 needs to say that you cannot intentionally or Unintentionally cause another alliance to incur a foul with 20p and 50p for Unintentionally and intentionally respectively. Just see the video in post #46 top of page 4.

Summery:
I think this is a good game with a misguided focus on how and what for foul points are applied and an all too weak G14. Also a lack of any protection for offence bots just makes more defense and interference play which means more broken bots.

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by jblay

This was a truly awesome read and I agree 100%. This game is on the tip of being so good, but it is so bad because of these penalties.

And the worst part is that it hurts the young teams. The experienced teams make sure they are aware of the penalties and risks and that their partners are aware, but a young team with a great robot doesn't have the experience to make sure these things don't happen nor should they. This should not be what wins and losses a team events.

I think it's incumbent that the more experienced teams train the less experienced teams. In both our regionals, the penalties fell significantly over the 2 days because as teams played with our drive coach, he trained their human players on what to do. By the end of quals, almost all of the teams had been through his mill. In elims, there were very few penalties. Over 6 matches, we only had 2 technical fouls added to our score, and one was when a robot was tipped over by a hard hit--a tech foul in any year. And we only had one tech foul against us for a herding call. (I also have a problem with the disparate definition of "possession" for offense vs defense.)

[Jim Giacchi]

I agree with this paper and have a couple of things to add.

Number one complaint is that I don't even understand why you are all talking about this.... everybody who has been in FIRST remembers that they eliminated penalties in a big Kickoff webcast presentation. Dean said there will be no more penalties....
For those of you who don't remember what I am referring to, At kickoff in 2012?maybe...(Help an old man's memory out someone, all the years blur together). they came out and announced, no more penalties! Cheering and excultation commenced, till we read the rules and figured out that all they had done was changed penalty to foul.... and the end result was FIRST reconized that penalties were killing the game and then proceeded to fix the problem by smoke, mirrors, and completely ignoring the problem existed.

Honestly I may be a but more jaded, but just eliminate penalties for anything other then destroying (intentionally) another robot. Let the robots play the game, it will be a LOT simpler and more fun to watch. If you need fouls to keep a game fair, you are doing it wrong.

Oh and bumpers are silly, build a frame for contact, if it breaks, you did not build it strong enough. I was opposed to them when they first came out and I have never grown fond of them, especially since they are a pain to make. Frankly, I miss the nice crunch sounds from before bumpers. (I've been doing this since 2000)
Jim

[dtengineering]

Originally Posted by Jim Giacchi

....
Oh and bumpers are silly, build a frame for contact, if it breaks, you did not build it strong enough. I was opposed to them when they first came out and I have never grown fond of them, especially since they are a pain to make. Frankly, I miss the nice crunch sounds from before bumpers. (I've been doing this since 2000)
Jim

I agree with the need to build a strong frame. But I haven't been able to convince the school board to build hallway walls strong enough to handle robot impacts. Bumpers to me have always been about protecting the world from the robot, rather than the robot from the world. (They also do a great job of eliminating "wedge-bots".)

But if you really like the sound of crunching metal, here's a great off-season event to get away from all those silly penalties and bumpers! http://www.botsiq.org/manage.aboutbbiq.php

Jason

[Donut]

Jim does a nice job of summarizing FRC history and I appreciate the perspective of someone who has seen the really early years of FIRST as a comparison. I started in FRC in 2004 so I wasn't aware that penalties hadn't really existed before (I knew alliances were fairly new). Overall I agree that penalties aren't an effective way of policing team behaviors, and penalties have to be possible and sensible to enforce.

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

The thing that sticks out most to me is that it seems like Jim thinks 2011, 2012, and 2013 are examples of how a FRC game SHOULD be designed, while personally I found two of those games to be some of my least favorite (2011 for the completely overpowered minibot, and 2012 because objectively defensive play was next to worthless). I enjoy sports that celebrate good, clean, physical contact, like a hockey check or a football tackle or even an outfielder dive or home-base collision (while they're still allowed to do that). The excessive amount of "Safe Zones" in these three games made any physicality almost moot, becoming a game of who-can-score-the-most (NBA basketball anyone?). Personally I missed the robot collisions and rigorous defense of old. I find this game a breath of fresh air in that aspect.

I also got this reading the paper. Although the amount of rough gameplay has gotten out of hand this season, I am glad to see a game without safe zones. I find offensive robots that are untouchable while scoring, loading, and driving across certain portions of the field to be a tad boring to watch at times. I really liked 2013 but wasn't a big fan of 2011, and 2012 was hit or miss depending on the matches. I know the paper is about the penalty system but it's a very different perspective on some of the rule additions of the last few years.

In both this thread and the other penalty paper thread I have seen numerous comments that the major failing of this game is a single game piece, which gives teams without a ball nothing to do other than pound on each other. I concede that this is not a good thing, but I can also see why the GDC attempted it besides forcing cooperation, which is that it makes the match flow much easier to watch from a spectator perspective. If you discount the confusing "what is an assist?" rules (unique robots... in unique zones... huh?) this is one of the easiest games to watch as a spectator ever. In autonomous teams simply try to score the ball in the goal, and the rest of the match you never have to watch more than 2 game pieces at a time. No end game maneuvers, no doubler balls, no bonuses for owning goals. If the whole assist system had been tossed out I still think a decent amount of passing between teams would have occurred simply because this is the most effective way to move the ball down field under defense.

I've heard complaints since I joined in 2004 that FRC games are difficult to follow because there are too many game pieces at once and too many ways to score for an easy explanation. How do you resolve that issue with the conflicting problem of teams having nothing to do but wale on each other?

[xSAWxBLADEx]

Originally Posted by Donut

...I've heard complaints since I joined in 2004 that FRC games are difficult to follow because there are too many game pieces at once

I've only heard scouters say this. The non-FIRST spectators like to see, at least from my experience, controlled chaos. A great example of this was 2006. Impossible to scout every ball scored, but the spectators loved it.

[mathking]

I did a completely non-representative sample of all of our parents who went to our competition and have been to at least one other. All of them felt that this game was good to watch (not all said it was their favorite) and all felt that this game was easier to understand than any previous game they had seen.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

I agree with the need to build a strong frame. But I haven't been able to convince the school board to build hallway walls strong enough to handle robot impacts. Bumpers to me have always been about protecting the world from the robot, rather than the robot from the world. (They also do a great job of eliminating "wedge-bots".)

But if you really like the sound of crunching metal, here's a great off-season event to get away from all those silly penalties and bumpers! http://www.botsiq.org/manage.aboutbbiq.php

Jason

Bumpers have always been about protecting the field from the robots. With the increase in power fields were getting pretty beat up. Still do to an extent (see 125 running our intake underneath the diamond plate at RI after a hit)

[Max Boord]

Originally Posted by orangemoore

Can anyone elaborate what the "Wildstang Pinata" is from 2004 that would be great.

I was only 8 at the time but ill try to explain it.

The 2004 game was called FIRST frenzy: raising the bar. the name came from a 12 foot high "chin up" bar placed at the center of the field.

A way to get a large amount of points was to simply hanag from the bar however, because both alliances hung from the same bar there was bound to be midair colissions. This was sometimes awsome as I remember seeing a robot climb over the top of another robot to get there hang points but more commonly it was a slam fest to be the first one hanging. In the case of wildstang because they hung rather high teams would wack them with there apendages and not draw any penalties resulting in the "Wialdstang Pinata".