Stronghold rant...

[cj3958]

Originally Posted by rtfgnow

Did you ask the refs at your events if any of them had a team competing or had a day job or had college classes to attend? I will be dumbfounded if more than 5% of FIRST Stronghold refs can say no to that question.

I am not going to say that refs are infallible, but I will say that they do a thankless job for no money, often at expense to them, and never get to hear the end of people that have never done the job trying to get them to do even better. For every match that CD gripes about, I expect there are 50 that garner no complaints[1], 98% success is pretty good for volunteers.

[1] I might try tracking this next year.

Sure. Fine. They all have day jobs. But who isn't thanking them? Everyone realizes they are important and necessary. Sometimes it sucks dealing with them when you disagree on a ruling, but so what? people still realize that at the end of the day they are doing their best, and an important part of the game.

But you are ignoring the other points I made. Why are we not allowed to talk about refs as a whole on CD? If anyone anywhere makes an even SLIGHTLY critical comment towards referees, the automatic first responce is "hur dur well if you are so talented why don't you do it...". It is very unproductive to never be able to talk about refs at all, even when we are not talking about a perticular ref or a perticular instance.

Refs are doing god's work, but that doesn't mean that we cant have a discussion about ways to make them better or say that overall, as a whole, not talking about any particular places they may have screwed up, the reffing quality was not up to par(IMHO) this year considering it is a competition trying to call itself a real sport worth of varsity letters etc etc etc. There could be many reasons for this, 99% of which I would blame on the GDC and the training system, not on the refs themselfs, but presently I cannot even express that opinion on CD.

What I am trying to say is in its current state, there can be no constructive criticism of referees as a whole on CD recently and this is a problem.