Buyers' remorse / Pig in a poke

[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by martin417

For those that say inspiration is not about winning, think of the people you want to inspire as potential "fans". Winning teams have more fans than losing teams. I would be willing to bet that the University of Alabama could pull more fans to a game than the New Mexico State Aggies.

Inspiration certainly has winning as a big part, because that's one of the big ways we recognize those who excel. However, I try not to make a big fuss over winning when we can skip that and focus directly on the excellence/inspiration, particularly when we can control the latter and not the former.

The unfortunate thing about the inconsistent refereeing and strength of schedule and everything being pointed out here is it leaves those who work very hard year long and do excel without the recognition they deserve, while recognizing someone else. This does not send the message that excellence is something to strive for, but rather that you just have to get lucky and play the system.

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

I'm sorry, but in the 6 years I've been mentoring in FIRST I could count the number of times a teammate has "refused" to help on one hand. Maybe that is just the area I'm in but I can't imagine that happening so often that it effects your rankings that badly. I can't also imagine that you are stuck with 2 immobile robots so often that you have to do everything on your own.

It's more ineptitude than refusal.

We went into Waterford with the idea that we would play for 3 assists in every match. Things went well our first match. Then over the next 3 matches we accumulated a grand total of 10 assist points (not 10 points per match - 10 points TOTAL over those 3 matches).

All three of those matches involved 2 boxes on wheels or a box on wheels plus an unusable intake. We tried our best to help them assist, but after 20 seconds of fumbling around in teleop and the referee still hasn't given an assist credit, the most recent bump into a ball by the partner sent the ball way across the field (with no assist credit), and all the while the opposing alliance is building up a lead, what can you do? At this rate we'll be lucky to get a single cycle completed and lose the match, or we can decide to scrap it and get 20 points a cycle using the one-man-show truss then shoot strategy. Since wins are still more important than assists, we had to abandon the assist strategy and just try as hard as we could to catch up and win the match.

Every one of those matches we had a good plan to get the assists, and every match it became clear that an assist just wasn't going to happen.

With all of that being said, that doesn't mean I hate the game. As was already mentioned, we would have difficulty with those matches in any game.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

For everyone saying that the ranking accuracy is worse or that elimination upsets are more frequent this year, I challenge you to provide evidence to support your assertion. Not anecdotes, not hypotheses, not thought experiments. Actual data to support your claim.

This is extremely difficult to do, even with full scouting data - no one / two / three stats correlates perfectly with overall robot quality particularly with a multiple role game. You can't even accurately say how many points a robot scored in a match - who gets the assist points? I have data, if you have an idea what good evidence would be for this claim, let me know and I'll work on it.

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

It's more ineptitude than refusal.

We went into Waterford with the idea that we would play for 3 assists in every match. Things went well our first match. Then over the next 3 matches we accumulated a grand total of 10 assist points (not 10 points per match - 10 points TOTAL over those 3 matches).

All three of those matches involved 2 boxes on wheels or a box on wheels plus an unusable intake. We tried our best to help them assist, but after 20 seconds of fumbling around in teleop and the referee still hasn't given an assist credit, the most recent bump into a ball by the partner sent the ball way across the field (with no assist credit), and all the while the opposing alliance is building up a lead, what can you do? At this rate we'll be lucky to get a single cycle completed and lose the match, or we can decide to scrap it and get 20 points a cycle using the one-man-show truss then shoot strategy. Since wins are still more important than assists, we had to abandon the assist strategy and just try as hard as we could to catch up and win the match.

Every one of those matches we had a good plan to get the assists, and every match it became clear that an assist just wasn't going to happen.

With all of that being said, that doesn't mean I hate the game. As was already mentioned, we would have difficulty with those matches in any game.

What about having your partner pin the ball against the wall? Or one strategy we've talked about is drop the ball in front of the low goal and have your partner push it in for the assist and the point. I understand it's easier said than done, we're making sure to ask the refs during the drivers meeting what they are going to consider an assist so we can attempt to think about some easy ways box bots can help generate assists.

[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

For everyone saying that the ranking accuracy is worse or that elimination upsets are more frequent this year, I challenge you to provide evidence to support your assertion. Not anecdotes, not hypotheses, not thought experiments. Actual data to support your claim.

This data may be difficult to come by, since the results have been inconsistent across events. In my experience, where the foul-heavy, inconsistent, or even incompetent refing is taking place, there are upsets and anomalous rankings. Where these are not a problem, rankings are accurate and high seeds go far in elims. But as you said this is anecdotal, and even the preliminary judgments of foul prevalence, inconsistency, inappropriate rankings, and upsets will be somewhat subjective unless backed up by data, before any such conclusion can be drawn with confidence. Some suggestions would be to look at, for each event, Winning Margin without foul points stats, stats on whether red or blue won elims matches, stats on declines in selections, what sort of actions determined upset results (clean match, fouls, etc.), and things of that sort. Perhaps a correlation can be drawn, perhaps not.

[Monochron]

I see an awful lot of people hating on "this year's game" as a bad challenge, but the only legitimate issues consistently sited are 1) Fouls and 2) The concept of one game piece at a time.
Now, only one of those things pertain to the main flow of the game. Fouls are like guardrails that you have to design your strategy around. The strategy part is robust enough, it is just that the guardrails are made of gasoline and spikes and are placed in the middle of the road this year.

I agree the foul system is broken this year. But let's stop harping on how the game concept itself is the worst in recent memory. The game itself has some issues, but let's stop blaming the GDC so heavily for the game itself.

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by notmattlythgoe

What about having your partner pin the ball against the wall? Or one strategy we've talked about is drop the ball in front of the low goal and have your partner push it in for the assist and the point. I understand it's easier said than done, we're making sure to ask the refs during the drivers meeting what they are going to consider an assist so we can attempt to think about some easy ways box bots can help generate assists.

Interesting you mention that: that was our strategy (to have them pin the ball against the rail). We even briefed the refs that we were going to do it. Then the ball got put in play and it got bumped, started rolling around, and it seems it becomes nearly impossible to track down after that starts to happen.

[mrnoble]

Comparing FRC to the corrupt debacle that is college football is an absolute dead end, in my opinion. I don't care how many fans Alabama has.

Follow that road where it leads and FRC teams should recruit top Lego League talent, and try to convince smart and talented kids to leave the teams across town because, you know, that team are losers.

The "fans" who show up to support my team are the parents, teachers, and younger siblings of my students, as well as our alumni. And each year that number grows because those kids accomplished so much to be proud of.

I'm sorry if your team has had a bad year, seriously. But my team, in our first regional, had an apparent victory in QF snatched after the fact due to the difficulties of reffing this game, and in the rematch their robot was torn in half. They have rebuilt from scratch the frame and shooter/collector to get ready for the next event. And they are HAPPY. In fact, the kids who came back from Utah say that it was life changing for them. I agree. They have done everything in their power, which was more than they ever thought possible. And that's enough to make me like FRC, and this (flawed) game.

[BigJ]

Originally Posted by martin417

For those that say inspiration is not about winning, think of the people you want to inspire as potential "fans". Winning teams have more fans than losing teams. I would be willing to bet that the University of Alabama could pull more fans to a game than the New Mexico State Aggies.

Seriously though, the NMS Aggies have an awesome logo.



NCAA Imagery award winners for sure!

[Aren Siekmeier]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

Strength of schedule is always an issue, this isn't anything new... and yet so many people are on here whining and complaining about it this year. Tough. Deal with it.

Last year, my team built an awesome robot. Unfortunately, once the game started playing out it was obvious we had chosen a losing strategy. We placed 4th at Lake Superior and were the first pick for the #1 seed, followed a few weeks later (with no changes to the robot, everything worked just as well as it did in Duluth) with 50th at North Star and the second pick of the #7 seed. I challenge anyone to point to results from this year that are any worse than those.

Last year, many teams did not have any hanging or consistent frisbee scoring working by the Duluth event, not to mention very few consistent auto modes. Hanging consistently every match was a solid 50 points and no hanging and just a few frisbees made that hard to beat. By Week 5, there were several teams that had cycling more refined and could put up closer to 70 points with frisbees alone (plus auto!). By the end of the season, the more refined cycling strategies proved more capable than a dedicated climbing strategy. Like you said, you chose a strategy that unfortunately did not pan out at higher levels.

However, this year, the dominant strategy is undoubtedly to get at least one assist and consistently truss and score for 10, along side a consistent auto mode. While in Duluth, the rankings reflected this very well, with the best robots all in the top 8, at North Star, the 5 best robots were scattered across the top 30, with the third best machine (by my judgment), 3883, all the way down at 29. This was not because they chose a strategy that lost its effectiveness as the season progressed. This was because they played against literally every other good robot at the event, and never with one of them. 3928 was stuck at 12 and had no choice but to accept the number 2 seed, 4244, a box on wheels that never touched a ball once in their two quarterfinal matches. North Star also had several upsets in elims, while Duluth had none (the blue alliance won a single elimination match). All of this corresponds very neatly with my observation of the reffing and field reset quality at both events, as well as with the strength of schedule of all teams in question. Maybe you could say that the refs made drawing fouls and not having field faults a more competitive strategy at North Star, so the dominant strategy I'm talking about was no longer effective. But I think that would make a lot of people pretty unhappy, and I think that's what this whole conversation is about...

So it's a little rough to tell people to just "Deal with it" when they clearly have been and they clearly should not have to.

[KevinG]

Originally Posted by Monochron

I see an awful lot of people hating on "this year's game" as a bad challenge, but the only legitimate issues consistently sited are 1) Fouls and 2) The concept of one game piece at a time.
Now, only one of those things pertain to the main flow of the game. Fouls are like guardrails that you have to design your strategy around. The strategy part is robust enough, it is just that the guardrails are made of gasoline and spikes and are placed in the middle of the road this year.

I agree the foul system is broken this year. But let's stop harping on how the game concept itself is the worst in recent memory. The game itself has some issues, but let's stop blaming the GDC so heavily for the game itself.

We shouldn't blame the people who designed the game for the flaws in what they designed? Who should we blame then?

The issue with the fouls isn't that they exist. Fouls are necessary to shape player behavior and ensure safety and fairness for people and robots. The issue is that the fouls are being inconsistently enforced. You can't design a strategy around an arbitrarily enforced rule set.

[Lil' Lavery]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

This is extremely difficult to do, even with full scouting data - no one / two / three stats correlates perfectly with overall robot quality particularly with a multiple role game. You can't even accurately say how many points a robot scored in a match - who gets the assist points? I have data, if you have an idea what good evidence would be for this claim, let me know and I'll work on it.

Originally Posted by compwiztobe

This data may be difficult to come by, since the results have been inconsistent across events. In my experience, where the foul-heavy, inconsistent, or even incompetent refing is taking place, there are upsets and anomalous rankings. Where these are not a problem, rankings are accurate and high seeds go far in elims. But as you said this is anecdotal, and even the preliminary judgments of foul prevalence, inconsistency, inappropriate rankings, and upsets will be somewhat subjective unless backed up by data, before any such conclusion can be drawn with confidence. Some suggestions would be to look at, for each event, Winning Margin without foul points stats, stats on whether red or blue won elims matches, stats on declines in selections, what sort of actions determined upset results (clean match, fouls, etc.), and things of that sort. Perhaps a correlation can be drawn, perhaps not.

I agree that's it's difficult to do, and harder still to separate whatever stats we can create from noise (given that all the historical context is flawed at best because of the constantly changing games). But I don't think decisions should be made on anecdotes or small sample sizes. We have these types of gripes about many games. There was a point last year where people felt that Ultimate Ascent was an upset friendly game as well. Commentary on the ranking system and serpentine draft happen for many FRC games, not just this one.

As for suggestions of how to measure the impact, there are a few ways you could go about it. None are foolproof, but they may at least begin to paint a picture of what's happening, and hopefully would be useful for the community as a whole in the future. First and foremost, tracking what alliance's win in each round, and which alliances win tournaments as a whole. There are some already compiled in this thread and this thread pertaining to partial data sets from 2012-2014. While it certainly measures the combined results of several different variables, I'm uncertain how much delta we'd see in the final evaluations.
As much as I loathe OPR for comparing teams, over a significantly large sample size it could provide some high level information as well. Tracking how well OPR correlates to rank for 2014 compared to other games would be interesting. If you have significant scouting data, picking any one or two meaningful stats to see if any correlation exists may also be interesting in terms of helping to establish a baseline, even if it can't be directly applied to the 2014 game. I'm not sure if the sample size would be large enough for tracking declines to be worth much, but it would be interesting.

Any single statistical analysis would probably be flawed. But if we saw that multiple methods suggested similar conclusions, there may be validity to it.

[Jon Stratis]

Originally Posted by compwiztobe

Last year, many teams did not have any hanging or consistent frisbee scoring working by the Duluth event, not to mention very few consistent auto modes. Hanging consistently every match was a solid 50 points and no hanging and just a few frisbees made that hard to beat. By Week 5, there were several teams that had cycling more refined and could put up closer to 70 points with frisbees alone (plus auto!). By the end of the season, the more refined cycling strategies proved more capable than a dedicated climbing strategy. Like you said, you chose a strategy that unfortunately did not pan out at higher levels.

However, this year, the dominant strategy is undoubtedly to get at least one assist and consistently truss and score for 10, along side a consistent auto mode. While in Duluth, the rankings reflected this very well, with the best robots all in the top 8, at North Star, the 5 best robots were scattered across the top 30, with the third best machine (by my judgment), 3883, all the way down at 29. This was not because they chose a strategy that lost its effectiveness as the season progressed. This was because they played against literally every other good robot at the event, and never with one of them. 3928 was stuck at 12 and had no choice but to accept the number 2 seed, 4244, a box on wheels that never touched a ball once in their two quarterfinal matches. North Star also had several upsets in elims, while Duluth had none (the blue alliance won a single elimination match). All of this corresponds very neatly with my observation of the reffing and field reset quality at both events, as well as with the strength of schedule of all teams in question. Maybe you could say that the refs made drawing fouls and not having field faults a more competitive strategy at North Star, so the dominant strategy I'm talking about was no longer effective. But I think that would make a lot of people pretty unhappy, and I think that's what this whole conversation is about...

So it's a little rough to tell people to just "Deal with it" when they clearly have been and they clearly should not have to.

Go watch some videos from 2013 Lake Superior, and then try and tell me the seeding was because the nature of the game changed - there were plenty of matches we won where our robot climbing had absolutely nothing to do with it because we screwed up on getting set up for the climb. We were carried in those matches and ranked much better than we really deserved, based purely on robot performance.

[Pranit T]

Originally Posted by compwiztobe

However, this year, the dominant strategy is undoubtedly to get at least one assist and consistently truss and score for 10, along side a consistent auto mode. While in Duluth, the rankings reflected this very well, with the best robots all in the top 8, at North Star, the 5 best robots were scattered across the top 30, with the third best machine (by my judgment), 3883, all the way down at 29. This was not because they chose a strategy that lost its effectiveness as the season progressed. This was because they played against literally every other good robot at the event, and never with one of them. 3928 was stuck at 12 and had no choice but to accept the number 2 seed, 4244, a box on wheels that never touched a ball once in their two quarterfinal matches. North Star also had several upsets in elims, while Duluth had none (the blue alliance won a single elimination match). All of this corresponds very neatly with my observation of the reffing and field reset quality at both events, as well as with the strength of schedule of all teams in question. Maybe you could say that the refs made drawing fouls and not having field faults a more competitive strategy at North Star, so the dominant strategy I'm talking about was no longer effective. But I think that would make a lot of people pretty unhappy, and I think that's what this whole conversation is about...

So it's a little rough to tell people to just "Deal with it" when they clearly have been and they clearly should not have to.

Implying that blue alliance should never win because they clearly have the inferior robots. Nicely done.

You said it "so and so's machine was easily in the top 5 robots" according to your judgement. Why can't it be that they were ranked lower because maybe they DID adopt a strategy that lost its effectiveness as the season progressed. You are now simply undermining the improvements that the opposing teams could have made before or during the event. If you really think that a team can pick one strategy and stick to it from Week 1 of competition all the way thru Week 6 and Champs, I'm afraid you've got it wrong my friend.

Every team thinks they have built the best robot for the competition and to the best of their abilities, some clearly have. But that does not necessarily give you the right to openly criticize the robots that you may not be a fan of, or the game when the robots you are a fan of, don't do so well.

Now remains the question of the refs and the field reset who you have now called out in two separate posts. A lot has been put on the shoulders of these volunteers, as it usually has, and they are trying to do the best they can to make sure the event and the matches run smoothly and in a fair manner. If you are so concerned with the level at which the calls are being made or how the game pieces are being handled, try putting yourself in their shoes and see how it is from "that" side of the field.

And bringing up another point, think of going to an event with an odd number of teams. There will be teams playing "surrogate" matches, and even these teams are decided at random. So you keep your fingers crossed that the team you're partnered with moves, can pick up a ball, pass it, play defense effectively while they don't have the ball, and do this repeatedly over the duration of a match. Match schedules are designed to maximize the number of teams you face at an event. There is a reason match making is random as it gives each of the teams the same chance to face the others.

You really cant rant about you getting the short end of the stick in a randomized draw. Thus, deal with it.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by KGenson

We shouldn't blame the people who designed the game for the flaws in what they designed? Who should we blame then?

You answered it yourself:

The issue with the fouls isn't that they exist. Fouls are necessary to shape player behavior and ensure safety and fairness for people and robots. The issue is that the fouls are being inconsistently enforced. You can't design a strategy around an arbitrarily enforced rule set.

The game is okay. The existence of the fouls is okay. The thing that's not okay is the system by which the referees, using too-slow touch panels, are tasked with assessing not only fouls but scores as well.

If you must blame someone, blame the engineers who implemented that system. (But don't blame them too harshly, because they're working within the limitations of using the materials at hand.)