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.

[Caleb Sykes]

Originally Posted by jman4747

So you think box on wheels teams would be any better served fielding an RC car in the prescience of someone like 1114 any other year?

Not to nitpick, but did you mean "presence" here? If not, can you please rephrase this sentence?

[Rachel Lim]

Originally Posted by jman4747

So you think box on wheels teams would be any better served fielding an RC car in the prescience of someone like 1114 any other year? I'm baffled by how unimportant trying to learn anything more than tutorial basics is to so many of you. We should be pushing to build up resources and knowledge or poorer preforming teams so they don't have to suffer through watching their robot do nothing.

And how dare anyone compare having to sit through a boring match to having to play trough your own!

Instead of helping each other build effective robots to play the actual game we suggest that it was too hard? Hello, engineers solve problems for a living. Teams not having a role on the field is a failure of the community, not the game designer.

FIRST is about inspiration. The simple fact is that for teams, especially rookie / less powerful teams, not being able to contribute = not as inspiring.

I'm not saying it's not amazing to watch 1114 or any other great team. It is. I've spent hours tracking down webcasts to watch the top teams compete to see how they approached this challenge and am still in awe. But if FIRST's goal is to reach as many students as possible and inspire them, this game makes it hard.

There will always be teams that struggle. There will always be top teams that try their best to help them. (Please, your original post was to a mentor on 1678. If they don't do everything they can to help other teams, I don't know who does.) But there are also games that make it easier, games with smaller goals that those teams can be guided to do, games that give every alliance member something to contribute to.

EDIT: Just read Siri's post (which I just saw)...it says what I was trying to say more eloquently.

[jman4747]

Originally Posted by Siri

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.

I didn't say you weren't but clearly there's not enough in general. How's having easier challenges in the game any more inspirational? Being stuck at a one point goal doesn't feel or look any better. Small challenges have small rewards and that's not inspiring. Having challenging challenges gives you more to shoot for and gives you a reason to keep improving.

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by waialua359

KoKo Ed said it the best.

On Thursdays, its ZZZZ.
On Fridays, there are too many matches that are ZZZZ.
But on Saturdays during eliminations, there are as good as any previous season, especially if you are still playing come the finals. Is it really any different than previous years?

The game is definitely different compared to the last several years, but the excitement as a whole hasnt changed.

With Championships much bigger starting this year, I see it as gettting to a whole new level with the 8 divisions.
Matches are more fun and exciting when both alliances on the field are more evenly matched, where the better strategy wins matches. We should see a whole lot more given that elite teams will have a tough time getting 3 elite robots on the same alliance due the increase of divisions and teams.

I'm expecting April 25th to be as insane! I can't wait!

[Siri]

Originally Posted by jman4747

I didn't say you weren't but clearly there's not enough in general. How's having easier challenges in the game any more inspirational? Being stuck at a one point goal doesn't feel or look any better. Small challenges have small rewards and that's not inspiring. Having challenging challenges gives you more to shoot for and gives you a reason to keep improving.

Small challenges are not inspiring to you. That's okay, because they're small to you. They are not small to everyone, and failing at personally insurmountable tasks isn't inspiring. Have you ever helped a team get a consistent low goal score? It 'feels' (and quite frankly, looks) a lot better than consistently missing the high goal, or sitting there because you don't have the mechanism. It can be an important contribution. Success that you did not otherwise have is inspiring.

That doesn't mean stop striving, but it does mean you've achieved something you previously could not. Why do we have progressions in real life? Just let 4th graders take the ACTs all the time, they're scores will eventually get better. We don't, because there's other value in tracking lesser progress and providing interim goals that are still valuable.

The GDC has a difficult job doing this for a huge spectrum of team abilities. No joke. But they have done it before, even consistently. This year, the plot of Game Mechanic Difficulty vs. Inspiration/Contribution is...unique. That's why we end up with discussions like this, and others about how to help teams contribute, and cheesecake food fights, and tethered boat anchors. These are not community effects; they're game ones. They change with game design, and there are good things about this year's curve. This really isn't one of them.

[rick.oliver]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

I'm expecting April 25th to be as insane! I can't wait!

I concur.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

If your robot dies in a match, yeah, it's difficult. It's always been difficult.

No, it's not difficult - it's over. In the past, best of 3 allowed you to have one big screwup in a match like a robot dying and still have a fighting chance until the end of the final match in your set. In this game, depending on which robot dies, a single mistake at the very beginning will just end your regional.

The whole point of my post is that, while in the past this failure was a frustrating experience that an alliance would need to work really hard to come back from, in this year it's very often literally impossible to do so. We're no strangers to catastrophe in Quarterfinal 1 - it's just that in other years, we had some ability to come back from it and fix it. This year, done, might as well go home, except here you still have to play a completely pointless match, have fun.

[TheOtherGuy]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

No, it's not difficult - it's over. In the past, best of 3 allowed you to have one big screwup in a match like a robot dying and still have a fighting chance until the end of the final match in your set. In this game, depending on which robot dies, a single mistake at the very beginning will just end your regional.

The whole point of my post is that, while in the past this failure was a frustrating experience that an alliance would need to work really hard to come back from, in this year it's very often literally impossible to do so. We're no strangers to catastrophe in Quarterfinal 1 - it's just that in other years, we had some ability to come back from it and fix it. This year, done, might as well go home, except here you still have to play a completely pointless match, have fun.

How about getting pitted against the 1st seeded alliance in the traditional eliminations? What about losing a robot once you're already down a match? There are several scenarios in previous years that yielded the same result. If you've got a solid alliance this year, you'll do well; if you're inconsistent, you won't.

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by TheOtherGuy

How about getting pitted against the 1st seeded alliance in the traditional eliminations? What about losing a robot once you're already down a match? There are several scenarios in previous years that yielded the same result. If you've got a solid alliance this year, you'll do well; if you're inconsistent, you won't.

There are ways to keep those advantages and minimize the damage of Chris' point.

Add 4 more quarterfinals, drop the lowest score from each. Drop the lowest score of each team in the semis as well.

[jman4747]

http://leadwithastory.com/top-10-dif...-and-robotics/

Okay read that.

First posted here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...hreadid=136064 by the way.

None of that was dispirited or uninspired. This exactly captures my point about why FRC is inspirational and why Recycle Rush is not a detriment to the program.

[Nathan Streeter]

Originally Posted by pmangels17

There is another point that has been made on here, but overlooked. Even the greatest robots are awesome the first time you've seen them. But, once I've seen 1114 or 148 or 2056 make a wall of tote stacks once or twice, it gets old. In previous years, defense and strategy made it so that you never knew what was coming in the next match, even if you had seen the robots preform previously. Unexpected or unique strategies in previous years changed the gameplay entirely with things like 1114's blocker in Einstein Finals last year, or the other alliance figuring out how to defend 469's machine on Einstein in 2010, make watching gameplay incredible more enjoyable, and make the game more unpredictable, with some variety.

I'm going to disagree that the greatest robots are actually especially interesting this year precisely because of the reason you mention (that top teams go and do the 'same' thing every match)...

What made the Einstein Finals in 2010 and 2014 so extra-interesting were the fact that those forms of defense (1114 trying to block 254's auto in 2014 or 1114&469 teaming up in 2010) were against something everyone was expecting... against teams so successful and consistent that everyone wondered (skeptically) how they could be stopped. We all expected 254 to run their fabulous 3-ball auto... the question was how to defend it, since it's so reliable and parked in front of a low goal. In 2010, we all knew 469 was going to drive to the tunnel in auto and re-cycle the balls while 1114 fed the cycle... most people thought 469 and 1114 winning in 2010 was a foregone conclusion. But when 67 just played the midfield game so spectacularly in an 'ordinary' way, 177 assisted, and 294 did their best to snarl up 469's cycle, and then things just didn't go quite right for 469 and 1114 (2041 got stuck in the goal; 294 was highly effective), everyone watched in shock as the alliance of 67-294-177 won.

FIRST needs 'iconic' top teams to be like a sport. In professional sports, the game is the same year to year, and the seasons are long so we all get to know what makes someone special... what they're better at than anyone else or what their Acchiles Heal is... that way at the Super Bowl or in the World Series there is a story anticipating the event. But, the FRC game changes every year, so the top teams that make it to Einstein need to re-write their story every year... be so fabulous and so consistent that everyone in FRC knows what to expect on Einstein, despite a short competition season... that way when a team get's toppled doing their 'tried and true' or they have to deviate to counter an opponent, it is that much more exciting.

Besides, high-level elimination matches this year will be overwhelmingly intense... down-to-the-wire in the quarters and semis too, because each alliance is facing every other alliance, fighting to get those last few points to bump up their QA... I agree with Koko Ed, April 25th will be one wild day.

[Mark Sheridan]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

There are ways to keep those advantages and minimize the damage of Chris' point.

Add 4 more quarterfinals, drop the lowest score from each. Drop the lowest score of each team in the semis as well.

this would fix playoffs. Isn't this used in X-games?

[Karthik]

Moderators Note: It would be great if people could make their points in this thread without using slang terms for urination. Posts such as these have been and will be deleted. Refer to the forum rules if you any questions.

[MooreteP]

Originally Posted by Karthik

Moderators Note: It would be great if people could make their points in this thread without using slang terms for urination. Posts such as these have been and will be deleted. Refer to the forum rules if you any questions.

My bad, and I apologize.

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

There are ways to keep those advantages and minimize the damage of Chris' point.

Add 4 more quarterfinals, drop the lowest score from each. Drop the lowest score of each team in the semis as well.

This game is hard enough to explain to the audience already.

Come on, CD community, this game won't be changing. It's fine as it is.
It has addressed past complaints and yet, still, we are not happy with it?

To repeat an old saw. It is not about the Robot. See the forest, smell the roses, etc....
This thread has stomped on my buzz.

Try to enjoy these last few weeks and revel in how the strategies have evolved, instead of kvetching about how we wish the world would be.
Witness how three mediocre Robots can defeat the highest seeds by developing a clever game plan where the sum is greater than the parts.

/Rant over.

tl;dr people who wake up saying it's going to be a bad day are always right.