Excitement is Back!!!

[Fran]

I just spent the day at the NH regional and it is the most exciting event in years (I have been to plenty). The running unofficial score was great and it was amazing how the battles changed those scores. Back and forth battles and king of the hill battles......it was 2minutes of constant change and switching. the audience was crazy about it and cheered during all matches. The scores are deceptive...many were high until the last few seconds when stacks tumbled and everyone pushed so much that no one was on top. Eeryone steals bins and moves them, most teams divided their jobs but stacking was tough....defending the original stacked set was prominent in many matches but even those tumbled when the robots raced for the hill only to find their stacks get tumbled anyway.

I commend the FIRST team for a great game this year....keep up the good work.

Fran Leach
166 parent

[Joe Johnson]

If Fran Leach says it, I believe it.

This is good news if the games are really exciting.

I am looking forward to the Great Lakes Regional so I can judge for myself.

Any other opinions on the excitement/watchability of this year's game?

Your thoughts welcome.

Joe J.

[David Kelly]

well, i watched VCU all day. the webcast was awesome with no problems. but, i have different feelings about the competition. in my opinion, it's not an exciting competiion at all. maybe it's just because VCU is a regional with very young teams. there wasnt much action going on at all. i saw 1, maybe 2 matches where no totes were knocked down at all and the teams barely moved away from the starting position. i'd say the majority of the teams there just run into the stacks to knock them down. there is no variety at all.


perhaps as teams attend more regionals that some of the strategies will change and we will see a better game. so far, i'm not too impressed...

[MikeDubreuil]

I agree, the matches are very exciting. The last seconds really play key parts. Stacks going down, who gets on the ramp.

Many teams are helping opponents to gain additional QP points.

Stacking doesn't seem to be important yet. Defindng the human player stack is.

50% of the teams don't have autonomous programs running. Those that do get a huge advantage.

[Richard Wallace]

I've seen three previous FIRST competitions and this one has the best action yet, particularly when viewed from the stands.

This game favors powerful, rugged robots and bold drivers. Finesse is not a major factor. And the headlong charge during the autonomous period can lead to very entertaining results.

In St Louis today we saw several spectacular collisions in which opposing robots blindly charged the wall. After one particularly vicious crash, the losing robots ended up disabled and/or upended under a huge pile of bins, while the winners raised their grippers in triumph on top of the hill. And the crowd loved it!

[Dan Richardson]

Originally posted by David Kelly
well, i watched VCU all day. the webcast was awesome with no problems. but, i have different feelings about the competition. in my opinion, it's not an exciting competiion at all. maybe it's just because VCU is a regional with very young teams. there wasnt much action going on at all. i saw 1, maybe 2 matches where no totes were knocked down at all and the teams barely moved away from the starting position. i'd say the majority of the teams there just run into the stacks to knock them down. there is no variety at all.


perhaps as teams attend more regionals that some of the strategies will change and we will see a better game. so far, i'm not too impressed...

aye david, I was sick today so I also watched the VCU and Ohio regionals.. I had them both running on webcast all day.. There was a huge difference between Regionals, the Ohio regional has a lot of expierienced vets, ( techno cats and such ) and there were a ton of high scoring games.. and yes there were a lot of bots at VCU that did not work at all.. Metal in Motion has an impressive bot howerver

gots to give them props, I'd be surprised if they don't win VCU

[Ryan Albright]

i have to follow to i was kinda disapointed in vcu but i also know alot of young teams maybe it will come out better tommorow and i watch vcu most of all day cuase it had the best feed but ohio did have strong teams and wow chiefdelphi changed there bot alot it looks pretty good and while i look at the team list on first in no offense to anyone but i think the florida regional has the most talent in it we have such contenders as heatwave, motorala and such i think i fyou want to see action watch that on a webcast

[KyleGilbert45]

I'm not sure that this is the most exciting game that i've ever seen in the 4 years i've been in FIRST but i havent gotten the chance to go to a competition yet... I watched VCU and Buckeye over web-cast most of the day yesterday and overly wasnt all too impressed..but hey it was the first day so how knows whats going to happen....

Oh... and Stud Man Dan, its TechnoKats w/ a "K" not a "C"... it really erks us when people use a "C"...lol

[Rob Colatutto]

already at the ohio regional, today is going better than yesterday. looks like a lot of teams fixed thier auto code over night and drivers are doing better with the ramp

[sevisehda]

Some matches are better than others because of the mix of bots and attitudes of the teams. The finals are always more exciting because the alliances are built so you always have an exciting mix. Each regional is different some are more physical than others. There are also "more competitive" regionals that some of the consistantly good teams attend.

I do agree some matches look more like bulls in a china store than some of the beautifully stratigized matches of last year.

[Dan Richardson]

Originally posted by KyleGilbert45


Oh... and Stud Man Dan, its TechnoKats w/ a "K" not a "C"... it really erks us when people use a "C"...lol

my apologies go out to the TechnoCats for mispelling your name twice in one thread

:-P

[Richard Wallace]

Stud Man Dan, are you sure that was the Ohio regional you were watching? TechnoKats (Team 45) were at St Louis (which is in Missouri, not Ohio). I'm sure of it because I'm the one that inspected their robot.

[Dan Richardson]

I gots my regionals backwords and teams also.. was thinkin of 47 delphi.. muh bad my appologies to the TechnoKats

[Brant Bowen]

I just got back from VCU and i thought it was awesome. I didn't see a whole lot of matches, but i had a great time. Compared to last year's game i find this one more exciting, maybe it's the destruction??? Anyways i think that with the right combination and enough good robots there is some exciting stuff yet to come??? I think Chicago will be awesome, lots of good bots to go around there.

[bigqueue]

Originally posted by Joe Johnson
If Fran Leach says it, I believe it.

This is good news if the games are really exciting.

I am looking forward to the Great Lakes Regional so I can judge for myself.

Any other opinions on the excitement/watchability of this year's game?

Your thoughts welcome.

Joe J.

I thought I saw that Fran was from Merrimack, and I live across the river from Merrimack in Litchfield, NH (same state Rep. District this year)....and the name Fran Leach is familiar to me for some reason.....and you know what, I believe that Fran said too....because I was there at the Verizon center myself!

The game sure is aggressive.....even the practice round was rough and tumble. (more than normal)

It was great to look under the ramp every day....it was littered with bolts, wires, and all sort of varied parts and pieces that had been ripped off of robots tryng to make that difficult climb to the top.

I saw so any bots with dangling pnumatics....ripped up motors and plow parts dragging on the floor.

Out own bot had more broken lexan than I have ever seen in my life! (as an electrical guy, I used to marvel at the toughness of that stuff...not any more!)

The only thing that suprised me was the lack of robot stacking going on. It seemed that about 25-30% of the roots were designed to stack....yet very few even tried it.

Yea, and the cheering was loud and constant the whole day.....maybe we in NH are just starved for good robotics competition after a long hard winter of snow....and while that might actually be true, this is a great game!

I look forward to seeing you all at the nationals!

-Quentin (Team 811)