Why does everyone hate this game so much?

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

Why is it impossible to test an FRC game?

I didn't say it was. I did say "literally thousands of man-hours" of playtesting, though, and I think you can figure out the logistics of that one well enough.

(An added difficulty of why it is to some degree impossible to test an FRC game at all is robot variability and out-of-the-box thinking of tens of thousands of people. That's the peril of an open rules set...but people complain about the closed parts stifling creativity, too!)

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by nuclearnerd

While most people are going to be bad at discussing stressful topics like match outcomes and rule interpretations respectfully, I strongly believe that we should still have these discussions.

I agree 100%.

[mklinker]

The game has flaws but I LIKE THE Game!

The best part about the game is that it is an equalizer.

Some adjustments could be easily made to the penalties and ball inbounding to make the game go so much better.

Adding the "end game" mid season would have been fun as well

[Brandon_L]

To all - I realize I exploded in the heat of the moment last night, and for that I apologize. I do not necessarily wish I did not say it though. It was real, and it was what I felt in the moment. Its the same reaction I saw all weekend throughout the event. Most of you both for and against my method of venting my frustrations seemed to agree with my points, at least.

I woke up this morning a little less heated, and filled out the survey for the event in a constructive manner.

The fact of the matter is, my students worked amazingly hard, harder then any group I've ever had before. We pretty much had an 8 week build season - Our intake wasn't working properly so we withheld it and continued the grind. All of the time and money we spent chasing perfection feels wasted, as we're out ~20 MAR points and probably wont get an invite because of a hastily thought up rule that came out literally the day before the event and probably wont exist next week. I hope everyone can understand that is where my frustration is coming from. I am proud of the rest of the team for how they handled the situation.

Originally Posted by Andy Baker

However, we can play this game like it is, with hopefully some continued improvements between now and the Championships.

To be blunt, not us. Out of all the teams in FRC, only a fraction get to attend champs. I agree, champs will be much better, but what about the rest of the teams? At this point, nothing more I or anyone else can do other then wait and see. We're probably done for the season, though.

Originally Posted by Paul Copioli

There are many things stated by many people in this thread. There are many valid points and some crazy ones (from my point of view). However, I feel I need to respond to this one specifically. Neither VEX Robotics nor the REC Foundation (the actual company who operates and supports the VEX Robotics Competition and VEX IQ Challenge) have any intention of starting an FRC sized competition. The VEXpro product line was specifically designed to support the competitors in the FIRST Robotics Competition. Please do not read anything into the above statement. We are quite happy supporting the VEX IQ Challenge, VEX Robotics Competition, and FIRST Robotics Competition and have no intention of changing that.

My statement was an unnecessary callout, and for that I do apologize.

[Kevin Sevcik]

I won't say that I hate this game, but I'm really disappointed in the number of fouls and the seeming ease with which you can be hit with them. While the points obviously encourage offense, the rules and fouls seem to encourage a defensive robot just so you're not at risk of all those foul points. I think this is best illustrated by a quote from the GDC, as pulled directly from the rules:

Originally Posted by G12 Blue Box

A BALL that becomes unintentionally lodged on a ROBOT will be considered POSSESSED by the ROBOT. It is important to design your ROBOT so that it is impossible to inadvertently or intentionally POSSESS an opponent’s BALL.

Emphasis mine. If I'm supposed to design a robot so it's impossible to intentionally possess an opponent's ball, I'm designing a robot that can't possess any balls, and thus can't participate in offense. That's the only way you can come close to complying with this suggestion. Even if you ignore the "intentionally" there, it's awfully difficult to design a robot that can catch a truss shot or an inbound, but not unintentionally catch an opponent's ball that's flying at your robot.

I'm glad so many teams (mine included) decided to ignore the suggestion that we eschew offense in favor of avoiding G12 penalties, but I think it says a lot about the overall game design that one of the rules has attached a blue box that you're pretty much forced to ignore if you want to play offense and meet the actual challenges presented in the game. And I'm disappointed when that means that teams trying to play offense end up penalized because they were accidentally under an opponent's ball that took a weird bounce.

[JeremyLansing]

When this game was released I had very high hopes for it. I felt that it would give traditionally less competitive teams a very easy way to compete, since building an intake is not super difficult, especially with all the 3 day robots. I knew defense would be important and the game would be much more physical than previous years, but I had no idea that it would turn into the kind of Aerial Assault slug fest we saw at week 1.

The rules to begin with were missing a few key components, namely the possibility of robots dying with balls in their possession. Unfortunately, as the week 0 scrimmages and week 1 competitions showed, the game was extremely rough, which seemed to catch some people by surprise. Robots were smashed, irrelevant human player actions were tech fouled, and a lot of people's tempers flared.

I had hoped after week 1 that the GDC would take steps to address the issues in the game. I was quite happy to see the changes made to G40, and I don't believe (to my knowledge) a single G40 was called at Wisconsin last week. That being said, most of the recent updates have felt like Band-Aid's on a severed limb. The most recent update was extremely frustrating. Not only was it released on practice day for our regional, but it contained wording so ambiguous I almost wanted to laugh. I'll leave the specifics of the update to another thread, but as the game stands right now, I would go so far as to say it's not Aerial Assault any more, it's Ambiguous Assault. Ref's are left in the unenviable position of trying to guess the intent of a robot and sort their way through mountains of rules over who did what to who, where, and how many times. Each team sees the incidents differently, and we have seen recently how frustrating it can be when these phenomenally close calls have such a big impact on match outcomes.

All that said, I don't hate the game, and I still have hope the GDC can fix it. I think the concept for the game is superb, but like someone else said, it feels unfinished. My heart goes out to everyone who has been affected by the (IMO) poorly written rules. I know it's hard to make a good game, but after 2013, we all know the fantastic work the GDC is capable of.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

I didn't say it was. I did say "literally thousands of man-hours" of playtesting, though, and I think you can figure out the logistics of that one well enough.

(An added difficulty of why it is to some degree impossible to test an FRC game at all is robot variability and out-of-the-box thinking of tens of thousands of people. That's the peril of an open rules set...but people complain about the closed parts stifling creativity, too!)

I don't think this is as impossible as you think it is. Actually running thousands of matches may be impossible but within a week I've often run simulations of thousands of matches (likely many more). That's me, with excel/R. Like seriously, it's not hard. Do I catch everything? Nah. But it woulda told me that 2011 the minibots were ridiculously over valued. (2012 was the first year I started doing real models and running a bunch of scenarios, they've gotten more complicated every year).

But most of the egregious problems with games should be apparent with even a modicum of common sense. Examples:

- 2014 — One game piece per alliance? More power in the KoP than ever? More COTS for getting that power to the ground? Open field? Recipe for pain
- 2013 — Humans can throw frisbees? Rain of discs inevitable.

I don't know the make up of the GDC any more but I would imagine that most folks who've been involved in a team that is competitive would have caught those issues quick.

[Kevin Kolodziej]

The moment I saw this game at Kickoff, I loved it. The strategy is the best we've seen in a long time for an FRC game. There are many many many types of robots out there. The design of the game allows a decent robot to have an opportunity to play every part of the game, from inbounder, to trusser, to cycle ender, to defense - sometimes all in the same match. For the first time in a long time, I feel like this game is actually a competition and not an exhibition of who's robot is faster at a given task.

That, I think, is where the problem lies. The FRC community has gotten complacent. The last time we had an open field was 2009, and no one could get enough speed to really cause any damage in that game. Before that, you have to go back to 2002 to really have a dynamic "if you do this, I'll do this" sort of game. Maybe 2004. We have nearly 10x as many teams playing the game in 2014 vs 2002 - so naturally, there will be more complaints.

Are there flaws with the way the game is administered? Sure. The GDC is working on them. The decision to change a rule on Thursday, while not unprecedented, was a terrible idea (note: it didn't really work last time either, if memory serves correctly). The rule change itself is not a bad thing, but it is a knee-jerk reaction to the communities complaints and I don't personally like it.

My biggest complaint this year is consistency. Event to event will never be consistent, but that's fine. The inconsistency between days of a single event is unacceptable. Replays on one day for pedestal delays but not the next? That's not okay. Not a single high speed ramming call during qualifications but 10 in the elims? That's not okay (yes, play is more intense, but of the calls I saw, they were not damaging nor malicious).

How do we fix it? I say get rid of the pedestal light altogether and just take the ball when the ball is scored - end up with 2 balls on the field? Make that a technical foul. No judgement required there.

Referee consistency is partly due to the overworked refs - just put more refs on the field. I was told this weekend that HQ would not allow more than 4 refs + head ref for qualifying. I don't understand this at all. When I reffed in 2008, each quadrant had a ref, there was a head ref, and there were at least 2 other refs (maybe 4?) watching the scoring (tracking balls, tracking robots). THIS WORKED. Why can't we do that this year?

[JPopham]

This is my absolute favorite game now. When it was released, I was not a fan. I thought it was too simplistic, and had no end game which was the wow! factor. But now after playing it at two regionals, it was the most fun game, and required the most alliance strategy and assisting than any other game.

Good job game design!

[Mastonevich]

In answer to the original question, I don't hate it.

I love the life lessons this game teaches:

• Life is not fair
• Help\teamwork usually produces better results than working alone
• You can't please everyone all of the time
• Competition can bring out the worst in good people
• Good people sometimes get thrown under the bus
• There are two sides to every conflict
• Nothing is perfect
• Resources are limited
• Sometimes it is best to "sleep on it"

I also don't necessarily love it. It is pretty much par for the course in a lot of ways.

I do love the big picture of FIRST and the superstars of tomorrow it is creating.

[Nemo]

I think we are stuck with subjectivity in foul calls, because the alternatives are worse. I think the best set of rules would advise the referees to mostly let the teams play, but call fouls if the contact becomes egregious in the judgment of referees.

Here are some worse alternatives that eliminate the judgment calls:
1) Any type of contact is legal: results in battle bots
2) All contact is illegal: robots tiptoe around each other in fear of penalties, creating a lame game
3) Any contact within frame perimeter is a penalty on the extending team: penalizes offensive robots more, and allows teams to ram other teams to give them penalties
4) Any contact resulting in damage is a foul on the other team: pretty silly if you were sitting still and a team runs into you and breaks themselves, or if their robot was held together with bubble gum and a really light hit made their widget fall off.
5) Any collision faster than, say, 10 ft/s is a foul on the team that initiated it: how do you know which team initiated it, and how do you measure the speed? Better to simply admit that collision speed and intent are judgment calls on the part of referees.

Regarding the fouls for possessing the other team's game ball, I think the rules aren't hugely far off from where they need to be after the update that allowed regular fouls for inadvertent possession. The point value of fouls and technicals is still very high compared to the average match score, but I think it is appropriate that referees can award different penalties depending on the perceived intent and result of an opponent possessing your ball. The existence of that technical is important to eliminate any incentive to intentionally possess the opponent's ball and take the penalty. I think the smaller foul is helpful, because if the other team possesses your ball by accident, it still wastes some of your time. Other sports have different penalty levels, too: Hockey has major and minor penalties, basketball has "flagrant" fouls, football has 5 yard and 15 yard facemasks depending on severity, etc.

Last comment: I think games would be called better if the "can't cause your opponent to commit a foul" rule was consistently followed. The other team can't throw a ball into my stationary robot and give me a foul, and they can't ram their lego tower into my robot to break themselves and give me a foul, and so on. This is another judgment call, but it's a necessary evil to prevent other problems that are much sillier.

[Nemo]

I just realized that FRC lacks the following rule, which comes from this year's FTC rules:

FTC Rule <G11> The actions of an Alliance or their Robots shall not cause an opposing Alliance or Robot to break a rule and thus incur penalties. Any rule violations committed by the affected Alliance shall be excused, and no penalties will be assigned.

We really need this rule. All we have is this:

FRC Rule G14
Strategies aimed solely at forcing the opposing ALLIANCE to violate a rule are not in the spirit of FRC and are not allowed. Rule violations forced in this manner will not result in assessment of a penalty on the target ALLIANCE.

Violation: TECHNICAL FOUL

Referees don't technically have the option to simply not call a foul in some cases when that would be the best call. I can think of only one time that I've ever heard of a G14 penalty (or similar from previous year) being called on anybody.

[George Nishimura]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I don't think this is as impossible as you think it is. Actually running thousands of matches may be impossible but within a week I've often run simulations of thousands of matches (likely many more). That's me, with excel/R. Like seriously, it's not hard. Do I catch everything? Nah. But it woulda told me that 2011 the minibots were ridiculously over valued. (2012 was the first year I started doing real models and running a bunch of scenarios, they've gotten more complicated every year).

I'm interested in this. What sort of testing/validation do you think would be possible through mathematical simulations and modelling?

---------
On the thread in general:

I'm withholding my opinion for now. I would like to build on some things people have said though:

The GDC's job is very difficult. They have to design a game that's interesting to build a robot for, play, watch, make it feasible for teams with a wide range of resources, feasible logistically for event organisers, etc. Every year the list seems to get longer.

What could we do to help?

Currently there's only two ways to communicate with the GDC. Indirectly through posting on ChiefDelphi (we know at least one member reads it) and semi-directly through the Q&A.

The rules come out seven weeks before the first regional. That's seven weeks where we can potentially 'fix' a lot of the problems.

For example, the situation at Waterloo, where a team was penalised 50pt because another team accidentally broke their antenna so they extended beyond the 20in perimeter (G24), has existed since January. Could someone have spotted that and alerted the GDC?

G40 exists because it's a huge safety concern. Maybe there's a better, feasible way to keep human players safe but not make it easy to incur a huge draconian penalty.

While CD does not extend its reach to everyone, even here we have a large pool of smart, dedicated people that represent most of the FIRST community: engineers, students, mentors, event organizers, inspectors, refs etc. Why can't we take a more active role in at least informing the GDC, if not helping in a more direct way somehow?

A mentor from 610 (I believe, forgive me for the lack of details - I'm on my phone) suggested finding a means of including more input from the experienced and competition-saavy. Is that the solution and, if so, how can we implement it?

This program is designed to help inspire a new generation of problem-solvers. Depending on your perspective, there's a few problems or a lot of them. I think it's time we shifted the focus of discussion away from "I don't like X; Y needs to be fixed" to "How can we fix X? How can we make sure we don't make a similar mistake in the future? Are our solutions good? Are they feasible and inclusive?".

To get the ball rolling:

I think one of the over-arching problems that needs to be solved is the lack of direct communication and feedback to the GDC. I don't think we should rely on Frank reading a thread on CD to highlight major issues/possible solutions to the game. I think a dedicated, official, public, suggestion/feedback site akin to the Q&A could work, where more people can highlight issues and discuss solutions for the GDC to consider and maybe partake in.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by mklinker

The game has flaws but I LIKE THE Game!

The best part about the game is that it is an equalizer.

Some adjustments could be easily made to the penalties and ball inbounding to make the game go so much better.

Adding the "end game" mid season would have been fun as well

I really dont see this game any different than in year's past. Many of the successful veteran teams are still winning regionals, similar to that of recent years.

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

I don't think this is as impossible as you think it is.

I have sufficient experience in professional game development to be confident in my assessment.