2015 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[Jared Russell]

• The game was terrible to watch - by far the worst I have seen during my 15 years of participation in FRC. The only periods of excitement were the first few seconds (and occasionally the ensuing tug of war) and whenever a stack would topple.
• The game challenge was too difficult for the average team. The median robot in 2013 or 2014 was far more inspiring and effective than the median robot in 2015.
• The can race was way too important as a result of there not being enough cans in the game, and the resulting "arms race" absolutely burnt out a lot of teams.
• Cheesecake was taken to a ridiculous new extreme this year. I want to only have to worry about building one robot in order to be competitive.
• Litter, upside-down totes, and totes on the step were just unnecessary clutter that only ever lowered the level of play.
• Without W-L-T or any form of (non-canburglar, non-noodle throwing) defense, outgunned teams have nothing to cheer for but for their competitors to mess up. I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit. I do not blame them (and take the cheering as a gesture of respect for our robot), but it was a little hard to swallow and to explain to our students. I wish the incentives did not align this way.
• The Qualifying Average system made for a brutal eliminations bracket. Especially at events like MSC or the Championship, it is very difficult to recover from a single bad match - I like best 2 out of 3 because you can get one mulligan.
• The 607 team Championship felt very crowded and chaotic. Team registration and badging took too long. There were major traffic jams in the tunnels on Thursday morning and again before eliminations.
• I was once again left wondering why some of the robots I saw were at the Championship while other, far more effective robots remained home.
• Once again, FIRST totally dropped the ball on making sure people can follow events from home. The Championship streams were awful, and scores and rankings weren't event updating through most of the weekend. It is 2015. Why do PNW, FiM, dozens of regionals, or Chezy Champs have better streams than the FIRST Championship?

[blazingbronco18]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

• The Qualifying Average system made for a brutal eliminations bracket. Especially at events like MSC or the Championship, it is very difficult to recover from a single bad match - I like best 2 out of 3 because you can get one mulligan.

I agree. There was no recovery, no way to get rid of a bad match unless you advanced in ranking. It was an issue my team ran into during our second regional as well. Due to the lack of the 2 out of 3, it felt like every alliance was cheering for all other alliances to do poorly so they could advance. I hope we no longer have to use averages to determine rank. I look forward to going back to the 3v3 format.

[Louis_]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

[list]
I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit.

People actually cheered when those stacks fell over? That's just terrible, I'm so sorry. You guys are an amazing team and constantly inspire me, I hope that doesn't bring you guys down too much.

[tcjinaz]

Originally Posted by Louis_

People actually cheered when those stacks fell over? That's just terrible, I'm so sorry. You guys are an amazing team and constantly inspire me, I hope that doesn't bring you guys down too much.

"We're fighting for our right to boo the Dodgers"
(see a few WWII movies)

[Citrus Dad]

Originally Posted by Louis_

People actually cheered when those stacks fell over? That's just terrible, I'm so sorry. You guys are an amazing team and constantly inspire me, I hope that doesn't bring you guys down too much.

That was the nature of this year's game and the result of having lack of defense. Basing advancement entirely on cumulative performance instead of win/loss further exacerbated this.

[The other Gabe]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

That was the nature of this year's game and the result of having lack of defense. Basing advancement entirely on cumulative performance instead of win/loss further exacerbated this.

I think someone said this earlier: the game should be renamed Schadenfreude rush

[SciBorg Dave]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

• The game was terrible to watch - by far the worst I have seen during my 15 years of participation in FRC. The only periods of excitement were the first few seconds (and occasionally the ensuing tug of war) and whenever a stack would topple.
• The game challenge was too difficult for the average team. The median robot in 2013 or 2014 was far more inspiring and effective than the median robot in 2015.
• The can race was way too important as a result of there not being enough cans in the game, and the resulting "arms race" absolutely burnt out a lot of teams.
• Cheesecake was taken to a ridiculous new extreme this year. I want to only have to worry about building one robot in order to be competitive.
• Litter, upside-down totes, and totes on the step were just unnecessary clutter that only ever lowered the level of play.
• Without W-L-T or any form of (non-canburglar, non-noodle throwing) defense, outgunned teams have nothing to cheer for but for their competitors to mess up. I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit. I do not blame them (and take the cheering as a gesture of respect for our robot), but it was a little hard to swallow and to explain to our students. I wish the incentives did not align this way.
• The Qualifying Average system made for a brutal eliminations bracket. Especially at events like MSC or the Championship, it is very difficult to recover from a single bad match - I like best 2 out of 3 because you can get one mulligan.
• The 607 team Championship felt very crowded and chaotic. Team registration and badging took too long. There were major traffic jams in the tunnels on Thursday morning and again before eliminations.
• I was once again left wondering why some of the robots I saw were at the Championship while other, far more effective robots remained home.
• Once again, FIRST totally dropped the ball on making sure people can follow events from home. The Championship streams were awful, and scores and rankings weren't event updating through most of the weekend. It is 2015. Why do PNW, FiM, dozens of regionals, or Chezy Champs have better streams than the FIRST Championship?

I think you need to go to Championship event-The Thread "Videos from CMP"-It has your QF match, I do not think that is cheering, I think it was shock. When we lost in the semi-finals we got cheered for a great effort. The cheering was for the match not your lose.

[rkgoyankees]

Others have said it, but I wish the endgame would return. I thought that it made matches more exciting by allowing teams to turn the tide towards the end of a match. I thought that 2013's was balanced well. It allowed for alliances to make a comeback if they were behind but it wasn't an insta-win at higher levels.

[EricAnderson191]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

• Without W-L-T or any form of (non-canburglar, non-noodle throwing) defense, outgunned teams have nothing to cheer for but for their competitors to mess up. I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit. I do not blame them (and take the cheering as a gesture of respect for our robot), but it was a little hard to swallow and to explain to our students. I wish the incentives did not align this way.
  

Many people had 254 making it to the finals and I was shocked to hear that the team did not make it out of their division. I checked in with your team later in the day and they said that could go wrong did. This has to be especially galling after so many matches played at a high level.

Perhaps something to add to planning and practice for a similar game is to predict what happens when disaster strikes and how to recover from it.

Eric

[JesseK]

My only unique negative this season stemmed from the ability to make a robot taller than our trailer and taller than our crates. It causes us many hours of headache to have to separate the vertical towers in such a way that they would work smoothly with the lift when reassembled. Then there's the whole issue about short people being unable to work on the upper part of the robot. Cap the starting height at 60" so we won't have the temptation to put ourselves through that again

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

• Without W-L-T or any form of (non-canburglar, non-noodle throwing) defense, outgunned teams have nothing to cheer for but for their competitors to mess up. I will never forget how it felt to look up and see several thousand people and dozens of teams standing and cheering when our alliance knocked over a couple stacks en route to our quarterfinal exit. I do not blame them (and take the cheering as a gesture of respect for our robot), but it was a little hard to swallow and to explain to our students. I wish the incentives did not align this way.
  ...
• Once again, FIRST totally dropped the ball on making sure people can follow events from home. The Championship streams were awful, and scores and rankings weren't event updating through most of the weekend. It is 2015. Why do PNW, FiM, dozens of regionals, or Chezy Champs have better streams than the FIRST Championship?

Neither alliance had a good QF-8. As I pulled our robot off the field it was utterly nauseating to hear it - it was so loud and seemed to be coming from most of the teams in the stands. It was so emphatic, as if the crowd felt they had actually done something to topple the Poofs. My team will attest to the fact that I'm not an externally-emotional guy - but that moment was gut-wrenching.

Agree, 100% and more about the webcasts. Apparently each event has an A/V company who's in charge, and while my non-profit was willing to fork over a few $hundred for a high-res live h264 encoder, the DC Regional venue's A/V team refused to give us anything but the typical RCA output (even though HDMI was available...).

[Conor Ryan]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Agree, 100% and more about the webcasts. Apparently each event has an A/V company who's in charge, and while my non-profit was willing to fork over a few $hundred for a high-res live h264 encoder, the DC Regional venue's A/V team refused to give us anything but the typical RCA output (even though HDMI was available...).

There is nothing in the District/Regional Planning Guide about webcasts, maybe if there was we could get a little more standardization to allow for teams to host on behalf of the events. http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ning-committee

The organizational expenses on FRC is ~$36 million for 2014, and it is difficult to make it loud when we can't tell Grandma to tune in easily (but at least she can go to one of two championships if she makes it!). I'm really hoping we can get more transparency into the financials so we can get a good estimate on what the organization spent on the concerts/FIRST Finale at CMP. I think most of the organization would rather have a substantially better webcast and production over those add on experiences.

[DarthCoder]

I'd like to see it go back to winning instead of average score, and I'd like to see defense return. We had so much fun playing a defensive robot the year before, but we were kind of disappointed that defensive play was gone in Recycle Rush. When defense is an option it serves to even the playing field a bit, because the big high scoring juggernaut teams can still be taken down by a really good defensive performance. I also think that the way autonomous was scored this year wasn't very fun either. We got our can in the auto zone 90% of the time, but we only got auto points for it twice because other teams just sat there and everyone had to get inside the auto zone for any points to count.

[MagiChau]

Originally Posted by Conor Ryan

There is nothing in the District/Regional Planning Guide about webcasts, maybe if there was we could get a little more standardization to allow for teams to host on behalf of the events. http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...ning-committee

The organizational expenses on FRC is ~$36 million for 2014, and it is difficult to make it loud when we can't tell Grandma to tune in easily (but at least she can go to one of two championships if she makes it!). I'm really hoping we can get more transparency into the financials so we can get a good estimate on what the organization spent on the concerts/FIRST Finale at CMP. I think most of the organization would rather have a substantially better webcast and production over those add on experiences.

This year FiM completely took over the role of providing broadcasts for Michigan competitions. Every competition I watched was provided in HD through a Twitch stream.

I think all of the FIRST planning committees need to recognize HD webcasts are the bare minimum for every event. Having teams provide the webcasts is only an ad-hoc fix since they may not be able to cover every event or become unable to provide coverage in future years.

The rest of the world needs to follows Michigan's footsteps.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by JesseK

Agree, 100% and more about the webcasts. Apparently each event has an A/V company who's in charge, and while my non-profit was willing to fork over a few $hundred for a high-res live h264 encoder, the DC Regional venue's A/V team refused to give us anything but the typical RCA output (even though HDMI was available...).

Yeah, we hit this snag last year and this year we didn't even bother in Virginia. 2363 ended up archiving the matches and I think they did it by attaching a camera to a pole at the top of the stands. It's pretty silly.