Team Update 14 (2016)

[Chris is me]

Can we just get rid of bag day and withholding allowances already? Who does it really stop anyway? Anyone who wants to be competitive (with some rare exceptions) just builds another robot. Rebuilds from the drive base up are not unusual even with just 30 pounds. Teams now plan their entire seasons around gradually upgrading and rebuilding their robots over the course of multiple events. No matter what insane patchwork of rules the GDC writes, any team that wants to win the world championship is going to squeeze every last drop out of the rules to do as much as they can as long as they can. Let's be done with this nonsense, so we can save teams across the world thousands of dollars each and make all of FRC more competitive. Aren't we all sick of this?

[Taylor]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Can we just get rid of bag day and withholding allowances already? ... Aren't we all sick of this?

no.

[Zebra_Fact_Man]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Can we just get rid of bag day and withholding allowances already? Who does it really stop anyway? Anyone who wants to be competitive (with some rare exceptions) just builds another robot. Rebuilds from the drive base up are not unusual even with just 30 pounds. Teams now plan their entire seasons around gradually upgrading and rebuilding their robots over the course of multiple events. No matter what insane patchwork of rules the GDC writes, any team that wants to win the world championship is going to squeeze every last drop out of the rules to do as much as they can as long as they can. Let's be done with this nonsense, so we can save teams across the world thousands of dollars each and make all of FRC more competitive. Aren't we all sick of this?

Originally Posted by Taylor

no.

Yes.

[notmattlythgoe]

Originally Posted by Zebra_Fact_Man

Yes.

[galewind]

What frustrates me the MOST about this update is the change of the size of the vision target. Why was this necessary?

(Time to adjust target and change our auto-targeting code).

[thatnameistaken]

Originally Posted by galewind

What frustrates me the MOST about this update is the change of the size of the vision target. Why was this necessary?

(Time to adjust target and change our auto-targeting code).

This was in update 7; they forgot to alter the text until now. The diagram has showed the proper height for a month.

[galewind]

Originally Posted by thatnameistaken

This was in update 7; they forgot to alter the text until now. The diagram has showed the proper height for a month.

Yeah my programmers corrected me -- they knew about it already

[Ryan Dognaux]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Can we just get rid of bag day and withholding allowances already?

I'm with Chris on this one. I think everyone knows that the teams with the resources will build 2 or 3 or as many robots as needed to be competitive. Bag day really only hurts the teams that can only build one robot and that's a good chunk of FRC teams. 4329 builds two robots because it gives us a huge competitive advantage. We've iterated a lot over the past week in our shop & fixed things that would have absolutely killed our first regional performance.

Remove bag day and you level the playing field for a lot for teams. Districts help with un-bag windows but a lot of us aren't there yet. Not wanting to change this because 'that's the way it has always been' is silly - look at how well District events are going and how people were very hesitant to switch at first. Change can be a good thing and is necessary if we want FRC to grow.

[FrankJ]

Does this count as breaking the game?

[Kevin Kolodziej]

If a team bagged a ROBOT and an assembly of spare parts, but the assembly of spare parts was lacking wheels, would a "reasonably astute observer" think that an assembly of spare parts without wheels could play this game?

*Note that this is not possible to do at this point in time, so this is a hypothetical argument...for this season...under the current rules and updates.

It has ALWAYS been legal to bag as many spare fabricated parts as you want. I don't understand AT ALL the point of this discussion of it being assembled to resemble a robot or not. Even if Team 900 used their spare parts on the practice field (not the competition field during practice? I'm a little unclear on this), I see no problem whatsoever. Teams test half built, uninspected robots on the practice field all the time.

[meg]

Originally Posted by Kevin Kolodziej

Even if Team 900 used their spare parts on the practice field (not the competition field during practice? I'm a little unclear on this)

Our spare parts were only ever used in our pits or the practice field (though some were modified and put on our competition bot which we got fully re-inspected). It was also NEVER used on the practice field when we were queuing or on the competition field, at the request of the LRI which we happily complied with.

[BrennanB]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Can we just get rid of bag day and withholding allowances already? Who does it really stop anyway?

The team that holds off building anything significant, goes to week 1/2 competion, copies 1114/118/2056/179/33/67's robot. and competes week 5/6

Or even team xxxx competes with weak robot week 1, copies and builds a completely new robot copying zzzz team that won their event for their week5/6 DCHMP/CHMP event.

[PayneTrain]

Originally Posted by BrennanB

The team that holds off building anything significant, goes to week 1/2 competion, copies 1114/118/2056/179/33/67's robot. and competes week 5/6

It's really entertaining to me that people actually think this would happen.

[AGPapa]

Originally Posted by PayneTrain

It's really entertaining to me that people actually think this would happen.

It happens in VEX.

I'd instead prefer a 4-6 hour unbag window every week. Maybe ban teams from adding non-COTS parts during those hours. That'll eliminate the need for a practice bot and stop copying.

[Nathan Streeter]

Originally Posted by AGPapa

It happens in VEX.

I'd instead prefer a 4-6 hour unbag window every week. Maybe ban teams from adding non-COTS parts during those hours. That'll eliminate the need for a practice bot and stop copying.

But it'd be feasible to re-design and then iterate on that robot in the course of a few weeks... it's much, much less so in FRC.