2015 Lessons Learned: The Negative

[hardcopi]

Oh yeah... get the API working. It makes us all look bad. We can get over 600 robots to work in an event but we can't update the website? (FYI I do API's and stuff like that for a living, it isn't that difficult)

[ASmith1675]

Unfortunately, I have far more negatives than positives this year, which seems to be the general consensus based on the posts here compared to the positive feedback thread.

1. This game was dull. It felt dull immediately after the game was announced, and my opinion did not change much. There were moments of excitement, but they were few and far between. Most of the time there wasn't even much cheering when a qualification match completed because there was no winner. In fact, the only time when there was much of a crowd reaction at all was when something negative happened, which shouldn't be the most interesting part of the game.

2. The area in which alliances had to work was over-crowded and any unplanned or uncontrolled robot motion could end put costing your alliance a lot of points. An alliance should ALWAYS be at a disadvantage if they're playing 2v3, but that was not the case this year, and in many cases it could have been considered a strategic advantage.

3. The Can Races. Possibly the worst part of this game. The cans are the most valuable resource in the game, they are limited in number, and more than half of the cans available to each team can be contested by the opposing alliance. I don't consider myself a strategic mastermind, but I saw can races coming as early as day 2 of design, I have trouble believing the GDC didn't see this coming. Once a certainly level of play was achieved, this was a required element of the game. Most of the matches on Einstein were over within less than 1 second of autonomous play (barring mistakes -- again, rooting for failure?). While it didn't decide every match, it decided the majority.

I feel that these races are even worse than the minibots were in 2011 in that everything comes down to the activation from the FMS. I never saw a clear answer about how robots were enabled, but when the race comes down to 100ths of a second, having something completely out of teams control possibly decide the match is a pretty terrible decision. NOTE: My team did not create a canburgler mechanism (though it was discussed), so this particular comment is not a reaction to a specific event.

4. Litter. Thrown litter was at best annoying, and at worst completely detrimental to watching robots actually perform the game tasks. I saw 0 robots that manipulated litter at all and none that intentionally "cleared" litter to the landfill. (Being the lead scouting mentor I watched nearly every match of both of our regionals). What I did see is litter actively clogging up drivetrains and mechanisms of many robots. Watching a high quality robot fight with a pool noodle as it drives is not inspiring to anyone. Thrown litter was also worth far too many points. That 1 piece of litter was worth the same as a 3 robot motion auto was a joke. (Though this may be more related to auto scoring than anything)

5. Co-op. The co-op bonus this year was not well designed. It felt very weird that the co-op task didn't seem particularly related to the rest of the game. I saw plenty of robots that could score co-op, but never built a normal scoring stack. Additionally a good number of very successful robots couldn't do co-op at all. Just a strange design decision. At least they could have had a way for the yellow totes to be useful in the playoffs.

6. The relative worth of these robots moving forward. These are the worst demo bots since 2009. I doubt we'll ever use this robot after the post season competitions are finished. We already had a demo which we could have used this years robot for, but opted to used 2014 instead. It was a massive hit, to the point where we broke our dog shifter by shooting so much. And because we were unable to get replacement parts quickly, we're using 2013 as a fill in. 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 all made good demo bots to some degree. 2015 will sit on a shelf, because its too big to easily transport, and the tasks it completes are not generally "cool" to demonstrate.

[K-Dawg157]

Originally Posted by Smitty1707

There were moments of excitement, but they were few and far between. Most of the time there wasn't even much cheering when a qualification match completed because there was no winner. In fact, the only time when there was much of a crowd reaction at all was when something negative happened, which shouldn't be the most interesting part of the game.

I completely agree with this. Everyone was cheering that their alliance made a stack, but the loudest cheering was when an alliance knocked over a stack or made a mistake... Not exactly the best thing to teach to students.

[Conor Ryan]

I didn't like the type of cheesecake at Worlds.
2011 style cheesecake, where robots shared Minibots? Awesome. I can't get enough of that. It didn't reconfigure the robot in the eyes of the community, it was just a neighbor helping a neighbor.

Throwing the robot that students built with mentors and teachers in their community and proudly showed off to sponsors and schools in the name of a last ditch effort to get picked? This is questionable ethics. Would I do it if I was in the situation? Sure, its a survival tactic, and as a mentor my students would be down in the dumps and it would be terrible to say no. Should it be against the rules? Yes. Keep the Build Season Sacred.

I would also like FRC to engage communities like Robot In 3 Days to maybe work out better guidance to better keep an "Innovation Sanctuary" during the build season (ie - Release RI3D material after week 5).


Now this is starting to sound like the Financial World and Regulation. Do financial institutions like making lots of money? Yes. Should we be allowed to do it certain ways? No.

[Hot_Copper_Frog]

Originally Posted by ThePaulitician

Detroit is such a run down city that unfortunately does not have the means to rejuvenate.

Ouch.

I'm really disappointed to see that consistently negative views of Detroit as one of the new homes of the Championship event. I'm also disappointed to see so many people in the FIRST community speaking on stereotypes/perceptions before doing their research.

Detroit is a beautiful city, with a rich history of technological innovation. It is home to the largest concentration of FIRST teams in the world. Our Governor is very, very committed to making FIRST successful and rebuilding the economy of Michigan with a STEM foundation. Detroit is coming back, in a very tangible way.

In case you missed it, here is what's going down in Detroit in the next few years before Championships arrives:

• $300,000,000 in road construction projects in the next year
• M-1 Lightrail system being constructed downtown to improve public transportation
• $650,000,000 project that includes a new Red Wings Stadium in Midtown, near Ford Field and complete renovation of the surrounding 45 city blocks to connect Midtown and Downtown. This renovation includes demolition of most buildings, and the construction of residential, small business, and corporate spaces. An additional 2 mile radius around this area includes plans for repaired roads, sidewalk installation, street-light installation/repair, and landscaping.

Originally Posted by ThePaulitician

I also feel that inclement weather could prevent flights and mess up competition scheduling.

There's not much inclement weather in SE Michigan in late April. Snow is sometimes a vague possibility, but it will in no way be severe enough to impact flights or competition scheduling. The likelihood of a tornado in St. Louis is higher than severe weather in Detroit in late April.

Originally Posted by ThePaulitician

Not to mention, with the mass amounts of people coming into town, how are there going to be enough hotels to facilitate to everyone? I'm not saying this out of paranoia of being in dangerous areas, but in Detroit, the entire west side is slowly becoming a ghost town. Are teams going to have to stay in the abandoned houses or are they going to have to stay 1 hour west in Livonia, Ann Arbor, etc?

Really? Abandoned houses? That's a little unnecessary.

Detroit is not becoming a ghost town. Real estate prices are skyrocketing, population has stabilized and is increasing, and things are looking up. And, for the record, Livonia is not an hour away. It's less than a 30 minute drive straight down I-96 Express.

I get that people have an ingrained picture of Detroit in their minds, but reading through CD over the past few weeks I'm getting frustrated by all the nonsense being spouted about my (and many others') home. Frustrated by FIRST's decision? Fine. But keep in mind that you're talking about a place that a huge chunk of the FIRST community holds near and dear to their hearts.

[E Dawg]

The overarching problem with this game wasn't that it was boring, or that there was no defense, etc. It was that none of the concepts made sense. Why was there no defense in the context of this game? Why were half of my totes contestable? There were very few things that anyone could present a logical explanation for this year, and that is why I am dissatisfied with this game.

[wireties]

I had to work the week of champs in Boston and did not arrive till Friday night. The problems with the remote data feed are just ridiculous. There can be no excuse. If volunteer/s were in charge of this, please reassign them. If FIRST paid a company or persons to implement the remote data feeds, they must be fired. Did I mention it was ridiculous?

I'm willing to do something about it. Ask me and I (with a good team) will fix it. This is not rocket science.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Volunteer food for those of us with dietary restrictions was abysmal.

Here let me make this very simple - if the only option is some lettuce it's not enough. Vegetarians (vegans too) have the exact same dietary requirements as everyone else. Which means we need protein and fat in our diet. Every single night I had to go out and get food because the volunteer food didn't even remotely meet basic dietary needs.

Sorry to harp on this but I cannot eat meat, it makes me physically ill.


There was also the issue of gnats all over the volunteer grazing area.

I'm going to go back to hoping seeing mecanums on einstein was just a hallucination brought on by poor diet for almost a week... /s

[mwmac]

Originally Posted by K-Dawg157

I completely agree with this. Everyone was cheering that their alliance made a stack, but the loudest cheering was when an alliance knocked over a stack or made a mistake... Not exactly the best thing to teach to students.

RIP Schadenfreude Rush...

[Kevin Sevcik]

Ditto to a lot of this thread, especially disliking how the game really forced you to be an everything bot to have a decent chance of success. We're not that team and we do poorly whenever we attempt it. We stuck with specializing in tote stacking and ended up with a bot that could nearly clear the landfill when we were on, but was largely useless to an alliance without a can specialist. Based on the Curie picks, most teams figured 2 mediocre can+tote stackers were a better bet than a can specialist + tote specialist. Convincing the team to avoid the omni-bot trap next year is going to take a bit of doing.

Things I haven't seen mentioned:

It really should have been obvious that herding 256 teams from the Pits into the Dome after alliance pairings was going to take forever unless someone organized it. If they'd pulled teams in order of their elim match play, or just prioritized robots vs. mini-pit crews, they probably could have started division elims a lot sooner than they did. If I recall correctly, Tesla was running something like 45 minutes late because of this.

Crowd control is, of course, a perennial problem. The confusion Saturday morning about opening the doors to the Dome but not opening the doors to the Pits seemed unnecessary. Especially when security tried to tell us we HAD to go to the Dome and couldn't wait for the Pits to open. Plus the lovely chokepoint on the 2nd-level where they only had one set of doors open between the Dome and Pits.

Rules enforcement. If you're going to make a rule, you need to enforce it:
Transportation Config was pointless because, to my knowledge, it was never enforced. I know of tether bots that were transported in two separate pieces because it was easier and deemed safe. Meanwhile we put wear on Anderson connectors to make sure we transported in our inspected transport config.
Since everyone was told on Friday to clear a 5x5 for a crate on Saturday morning, we did so and we greeted with a crate on Saturday morning. Literally no other pit around us bothered to do so and had their entire pit to work in. If we'd known this was optional, we wouldn't have bothered doubly inconveniencing ourselves. As it was, we insisted our crate be removed so we could do some work on the robot and pack without it in there like all the other teams around us.

Also better communication. I there were at least 2 different versions of how to get your crate removed on Weds. First we went to the SES desk who told us to just put the empty sticker on it and it'd magically disappear. I believe this was also the version announced over the PA. Our inspector, however, told us we actually had to request SES to remove it. We eventually shoved it into an empty aisle and let FIRST figure out what they wanted to do with it. Since it reappeared to inconvenience us on Saturday, they apparently figured things out.

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Rules enforcement. If you're going to make a rule, you need to enforce it:
Transportation Config was pointless because, to my knowledge, it was never enforced.

If it had been universally unenforced, that'd have been more acceptable than the uneven enforcement we encountered.

Thankfully this was not a major problem for our team, but at the regionals I attended whether or not the queuing officials checked to see if you were actually in transport configuration was basically impossible to predict. I saw robots go on and off way outside of the size limits multiple times, but also saw teams get called out for having minor protrusions that were not a safety hazard at all.

[Mr. Rick]

Originally Posted by Mike Marandola

I don't think so because averages are dependent on the field and the teams on that field.

Obviously I'm biased, but the two fields didn't have anything to do with each other. The awards never should have been split per "sub-division" anyway.

[Jared Russell]

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

Of all the negative posts, not one mention of the biggest change this year. A change that affected every team ---- The Roborio and the new control system.

The only thing I disliked was how long the DS<->Robot communications took to get established (I previously have called this "mDNS issues", but Greg McKaskle later clarified that the issue is more complicated than that).

In every other way, I thought the RoboRIO was an improvement over the cRIO.

[Mr. Rick]

Originally Posted by 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.

Thanks MsKutz! I'm obviously biased, but I completely agree :-)

It would have just been better to make it 8 divisions rather than cobble together fields and make is pseudo 4.

It was great talking to you and we're looking forward seeing you again in future events!

[Oblarg]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

The only thing I disliked was how long the DS<->Robot communications took to get established (I previously have called this "mDNS issues", but Greg McKaskle later clarified that the issue is more complicated than that).

I'll add one more minor quibble in that the signal cables, when plugged into the RoboRio, seemed mechanically less-secure than they ought to have been, though this is fixable by simply dabbing some hot glue on the connector once it's plugged in (thanks to team 1678 for showing us this trick at championships last year).