This year's "game" is a job, not a game

[Siri]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

I've addressed this problem on CD as well elsewhere, so I won't add much more than to say the game design and current build season model actually discourages that type of cooperation this year. Search my posts if you want more on this. Do NOT count on the "good will" of individuals to accomplish a community goal. Make the individual's incentives work toward the community goal.

Beyond that (the discussion we've had), this game exacerbates the problem by taking away a lot of the "way points" to success:

This is a very difficult engineering challenge. And difficult engineering challenges happen in life. I've got one in another window of my computer right now. But FIRST is not about that. FIRST says outright that it's not about that. It's about Inspiration and Recognition. And huge challenges that don't have intermediate goals tend to be less effective inspirational tools.

It is very, very difficult--every year--to help a team that really doesn't understand what's going on. Think about how much work you put into your build season and events. Think about the burnout that's discussed on CD regularly. Now think about doing that without anyone else who knows how to build a robot. Now think about doing that when the only way to contribute is to meet an engineering challenge that's even harder than the seasons your used to.

We can push to help teams. We do push to help teams. (For crying out loud, you [jman] are talking to a guy for 1678.) But it is hard. I say that because I do it, and it's difficult. And game designs like this do not help; making it more difficult to inspire helps no one. That's is not to say that we shouldn't have major engineering challenges in FRC. I seem to recall the GDC deciding that we should climb a 10 foot tall pyramid like freaking monkeys a while back. Setting aside the problems with point scaling, I rather enjoyed that challenge. Actually, it drove me completely nuts, but seeing our robot 10 feet in the air over Einstein was entirely worth it. And yet it would've been a really miserable season if that was the only thing to do.

Can our team community step up and do more? Yes, of course, always. But so can the GDC. The GDC is part of this community: they're its leaders in many ways, and they're the standard bearers for its goals. Why shouldn't they help in their own way?

Big challenges have big rewards. That doesn't mean we don't need small challenges.