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?

[MsKutz]

The Higest Rookie Seed Award for Carver-Curie went to Team 5442 which was ranked 16th on Carver with an average qual score of 142.90. The higest rookie seed on Curie Team 5407 was ranked 17th with an average qual score of 143.00 which was higher than the winner's. When they combined the awards for two different fields, they did not think it through. The award should have gone to the rookie team with the higher average.

[Steven Donow]

Plenty of things to go in both threads, but my initial though about Champs itself is the level to which badges/lanyards were regulated.

For those who weren't there, essentially everyone was required to wear a namebadge similar to a volunteer badge. Enforcement of this was incredibly strict. I saw many students, in groups all wearing the same team clothing, get seperated from their groups and not allowed through certain doors because they didn't have their badge. Even an, 'I'm going to the stands, my badge is there' was responded to with a, 'You need to go down to the registration desk'. Not to mention the fact that they were only allowing one direction at a time Saturday morning between the pits and stands, even going as far as cutting off teams from walking together...

[orangemoore]

Originally Posted by Steven Donow

Plenty of things to go in both threads, but my initial though about Champs itself is the level to which badges/lanyards were regulated.

For those who weren't there, essentially everyone was required to wear a namebadge similar to a volunteer badge. Enforcement of this was incredibly strict. I saw many students, in groups all wearing the same team clothing, get seperated from their groups and not allowed through certain doors because they didn't have their badge. Even an, 'I'm going to the stands, my badge is there' was responded to with a, 'You need to go down to the registration desk'. Not to mention the fact that they were only allowing one direction at a time Saturday morning between the pits and stands, even going as far as cutting off teams from walking together...

Does anyone know what prompted the change so that everyone had to have a lanyard?

[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.

[dudefise]

Although I wasn't with a team for most of the season, I was able to make it to a competition and was there for the first day or so.

It seemed to me like this was a much more technical challenge with precision and repeatability the key goals. For the drivers, I felt that this year was just as challenging as any other year.

Construction wise, it was much more challenging - slight timing delays or malfunctions couldn't be compensated for by "let's go play defense lol".

I felt the real losers from no defense were the crowd. While the FRC students all get excited about whatever and will cheer and yell for their team (or other teams) this wasn't exciting to an untrained observer.

Despite the increased elegance in design required, I would not want to bring a grandparent or non-indoctrinated student to RR. It's simply not exciting to watch.

I strongly felt that FIRST was going the right direction after Lunacy - with Breakaway, Rebound Rumble, Ultimate Ascent and Aerial Assist being very simple to understand games for the crowd. Flying stuff is also entertaining, which is good.

I also felt that this game detracted from the ideas of coopertition and gracious professionalism - in many cases, it was clear who would move on in a given elimination matchup. If your team made a mistake, you were done, and from that point on silently hoping for another team to make a worse mistake. Even if lower-seeded teams got through more often, it wasn't through superior strategy, just opposition errors.

I also felt that it was boring on account of a lack of buzzer-beaters and other dramatic finishes. I don't really mind the whole no-endgame thing so much as the fact that the match is pretty well determined within the first few seconds of canburgling.

If the goal is inspiration and recognition within STEM-interested individuals, this game is good. But to interest and attract those outside, we need real, hard-hitting defense in my opinion. Making FRC appeal to those who aren't otherwise interested in STEM or even education on the whole is a big deal.

I didn't really like this game. In fact, I would hesitate to call it a game since there is no direct competition. I understand that some people really liked it and I have no problem with that view at all - I've always been defensive-minded as a student and now as an alum who helps out on occasion. For me, this simply wasn't near the best game FIRST could produce; I felt that they regressed in the areas I consider key. To improve next year, I feel that they could

1) Bring back defense, even if it is limited. If robot-to-robot contact can't be a thing for whatever reason, why not goalkeeping?

2)No more average scores, this hurts teams who do well but have one off match

3)Flying objects/big, fast stuff is always entertaining. Putting a new twist on it shouldn't be hard.

[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.

[Orthofort]

Originally Posted by dudefise

1) Bring back defense, even if it is limited. If robot-to-robot contact can't be a thing for whatever reason, why not goalkeeping?

This is something that I think should be considered more. A lot of people complain about robot-to-robot contact, and especially in the case of 2014, trying to regulate this contact in an objective way. With this game it's made me realize that it's not that the alliances are divided that is bad, it's that there basically no interaction between the alliances. The can races were the only interaction, and they we're probably the most exciting part to watch, ignoring that they decided matches.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that keeping the robots divided can be fine, but there needs to be interaction. There can be interaction with more goalkeeping. I was initially excited about the goalie role last year, but disappointed that it was so uncommonly used, mostly because it wasn't useful a lot of the time.

FIRST was trying to mitigate all the complaints about Aerial Assault, but instead of removing interaction, make it more of a goalie role. I don't have a lot of experience with past games, so I don't really know how often a goalie-role, rather than a robot just bumping into another and trying to block its path, has existed, except maybe 2013.

[Louis_]

Another thing which I think many of you will find unfair is the dealing with snow days. My team lost 12 DAYS to snow. It was absolutely awful, but we were proud of what we were still able to accomplish. I'd like something for teams that have that much trouble, as I know many teams in New England will feel the same way.

[Qbot2640]

This isn't so much a lesson-learned from 2015, as a common sense suggestion (In my opinion, anyway). This year FIRST officially recognized Wednesday as the starting date for each Regional...in that same spirit PLEASE let teams set up their pits on Wednesday night. Keep the robot bagged...but get everything set in its place so teams can hit the ground running Thursday morning.

[JB987]

+1+1+1!

[Koko Ed]

This game was pretty meh til the elims started. I wished they would have founf a use for the yellow totes outside of autonomous.

The Can o' Worms at the champs for queing was not my favorite thing in the world but with alot of tweeking we made it work and that made me happy. It'll be much better next year.

The team badges were a disster! There were people using them to come down to the field and the stadium staff who were so good at keeping unauthorized people out let a ton of people in and just added more stress to the volunteers.

The paper airplanes need to stop! They make us look like unruly fool and make the field look like it's being played in a garbage dump! Is this how little you think of FIRST?

We need more districts!!!

[Munchskull]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

We need more districts!!!

I will second, third and fourth this. Districts this year and last year in the PNW have been amazing (with some select exceptions) in terms of quality robots that teams have built. What Autodesk has done in PNW CMP really makes it feel big and important.

Just my two cents.

[buckskinner1776]

Autonomous was good. It's not necessarily meant to be easy. Programmers spent weeks of late nights working it out and pushing mechanical to improve things that were an issue. I didn't see it as being make or break but a definite bonus. There were plenty of teams in finals that couldn't do it.

Taking take our thirteen hours to run division finals and Einstein was crazy. That's a long day of doing nothing when you're out of it if your going to hang out and watch. Then nine hours of travel after that.

The average of the scores outright sucked. Teams made it to the finals that really should not our would not have been there on their own. This dilutes the championship. Adding more teams has already done this and will again when they split to two locations. The top teams are there already. At that point they will be adding more teams that are not top teams. More diluting of the quality. If they would like others to have the big experience, then improve the quality of states or regionals. Cmp was a big let down after msc. It was like going through divisional in week two again. There were some more good teams to watch, but many that need some work yet.

Maybe IRI will become the real CMP without the first endorsement.