Was Aerial Assist Better than Ultimate Ascent?

[Kyle Stewart]

Originally Posted by Vupa

I personally believe it was quite the opposite this year. The game was actually very unfriendly towards box robots because of several different reasons. The reality being that teams that had difficulty with building a robot also had difficulty maintaining said robot. Unfortunately these teams are often rookie teams or newer teams, meaning that they are also not used to the rules of the games and the nuances of competition. Multiple times in competition you would have to tell a team to not do anything or to not use their shooter or intake because they would "get in the way" or "cause a dead ball" perhaps even net some unfortunate fouls. And although this seems like a poor showing of Gracious Professionalism, it is the sad truth because as a team, you don't want rookies to lose you a match due to fouls. Thus actually putting the restrictions on the simpler robots and their ability to participate in the match.

This is why this game is worse for simpler bots. In Ultimate Ascent there is no such thing as telling your rookie teammate to stop playing in fear of fouls. You let them play defense and if they could score you would tell them to do their best. In Aerial Assist there is just one ball per alliance and thus it is key on who has possession, if your alliance member is unable to actually do anything with the ball, then you want to minimize your risk of them getting the ball. Thus reducing their role to perhaps even less then mediocre defense.

I think there are two distinct features to consider, the game design and the rules implementation. A little bird at CMPs told me that the GDC comes up with the game and hands it to a different committee to write the rules, and it was the latter that caused the vast majority of issues in AA. Poor rules implementations defining possessions, penalties, and assigning the point values kept AA from reaching its full potential, and in that regard UA is superior.

To me, AA is several fold better than UA in terms of its game design. It is the first FRC game that actually resembles a team sport, and is far more accessible to spectators because there's typically only two game pieces. The high level of interaction between robots made the games much more gripping than last year's solo-fest. While the game design was far from perfect, the real issue was that the rules were written in such a way that issues were almost inevitable.

As for teams that couldn't possess the ball, I'd like to share an anecdote. In LA, Team 687 had a drivetrain-bot that Team 294 provided a lawn chair for so that they could at least inbound the ball. 687, affectionately dubbed ChairBot, became a crowd favorite and was selected for eliminations. For Vegas, 687 had managed to add a functional inbounding mechanism. We selected them as our second pick because they were really well driven, could do quick inbounds, and were effective defenders. They performed well, sadly being damaged over the course of 6 brutal matches in the semi-finals (3 separate field faults -- one was due to the cameraman punching a ball heading to our human player). We lost the finals in large part due to their broken drive train, but we feel like they played extremely well prior to that event. I still think we made the right choice with 687, and it was just the field faults that put more wear on their drivetrain than it could handle.

Teams also got good at herding or pinning the ball to get assists. If they didn't know about that, it's the job of their stronger alliance partners to inform them of that and help them get those assist points. It's more work, but helps make drivetrain-bots feel included in the competition.

My point here is that the problem isn't with the drivetrain-bots -- the problem is that teams would rather blame their teammates than come up with creative solutions when partnered with drivetrain-bots or limited functionality bots. Teammates can and should use this opportunity to develop both their GP and improve their strategic prowess.

I understand the frustrations of Strength of Schedule and inconsistent penalties warping the outcome of games -- we had to deal with both in CMPs. However, these aren't really issues with AA per se. The problem is that a game that is fantastic in principle had a slightly flawed implementation. Warts and all, I still think it's a big improvement over UA, and FRC is heading in the right direction.

Now all we need is for someone to give FIRST an algorithm to auto-balance match schedules based on teams' previous performances...