Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative

[Koko Ed]

What could FIRST stand to improve upon?

[Carl C]

I was disappointed to see that the Championship Chairman's Award was presented yet again after a long delay at a different part of the arena. If it truly is the most prestigious award in FIRST, I believe it deserves better treatment than that.

[natejo99]

Originally Posted by Carl C

I was disappointed to see that the Championship Chairman's Award was presented yet again after a long delay at a different part of the arena. If it truly is the most prestigious award in FIRST, I believe it deserves better treatment than that.

I totally agree. Our team voted not to stay around for closing ceremonies and left immediately after Einstein finals. Personally, I was looking forward to the announcement of the Chairman's award, and was disappointed that it was presented so late.

[ATannahill]

Originally Posted by Carl C

I was disappointed to see that the Championship Chairman's Award was presented yet again after a long delay at a different part of the arena. If it truly is the most prestigious award in FIRST, I believe it deserves better treatment than that.

I agree with this.

I would like to add the large distribution of valid places to find information. If you want to know which Einstein field your team will play on first (Mass or Energy) you need to read the tournament section of the manual, if you want to know which field (Hopper or Newton) becomes Mass you need to read Frank's blog. If you want to know where your team is allowed to sit for these matches you need to read the A-to-Z guide. This is one example of needing to go to three different sources to find the answer to a simple question (Where should I sit?).

[cadandcookies]

The music for the highest awards (Champions, Inspire, CCA) was just bizarre and also more than a little creepy. Sweet Dreams is not celebratory music.

Other than that, the Finale was actually pretty good in my opinion.

Some ongoing stuff is that we really need more transparency/a public road map for where we're trying to go as a whole. I understand that FIRST is "everything to everybody" but it's hard to effectively help FIRST when we don't know where we're trying to go.

[MooreteP]

The new website is horrible.
Difficult to navigate.
I don't see how it appeals to the first time viewer as I think it was intended.
It is also frustrating to a long time FIRSTer like me.

Who did they survey or how did they beta test it?

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by MooreteP

The new website is horrible.
Difficult to navigate.
I don't see how it appeals to the first time viewer as I think it was intended.
It is also frustrating to a long time FIRSTer like me.

Who did they survey or how did they beta test it?

I wish they'd go back to the old website. I just do not like using this one.

[Rachel Lim]

Pit maps should have team numbers.

Finals should not be decided by foul points.

Having divisions announced earlier would have been very nice.

[Kpchem]

High-level summary: FIRST needs to work on cleaning up the transitions during Einstein and Closing Ceremonies.

There was downtime between matches where it looked like the fields were green and ready to go, but nothing was happening. Sometimes it was filled with dance songs, but often it was filled with nothing at all. And while part of that can be attributed to technical issues with the Audience Screen from the FMS or connection issues, I would be surprised if that was the case.

If there is going to be a lot of downtime between the end of Einstein matches and Closing Ceremonies, then it would be nice if it was communicated earlier on to teams and audience members. I understand that time is needed to tear down the fields and clear things out, but if I remember correctly they didn't give people a good idea of when that was going to be finished until about halfway through the break (and I might be wrong on that, feel free to correct me). I'm sure there are teams that left after Einstein matches finished who wanted to stay for the Champions, Inspire, and Chairman's Award presentations but didn't know when they were going to happen.

FIRST needs to do a better job of communicating/advertising what the closing acts are going to be during closing ceremonies. I know the names of the groups performing were briefly mentioned during Opening Ceremonies, but unless you researched those groups (I know I didn't) you don't know what you were missing by leaving early. And even if you stayed for part of the acts, there was no clear indication during Closing Ceremonies whether or not the act that just finished was the last act or not, causing people to at least start getting ready to leave even when there was much more to see.

I really liked the production value and introduction of all of the teams on Einstein at the beginning, but just overall it seemed to go downhill very quickly from there.

[Knufire]

Design games where the referees aren't also scorers.

[Metonym]

Putting big signs saying what divisions was in what section of the pits would have been nice. I spent a good chunk of my Wednesday evening trying to figure this out so I would be ready to catch all my teams the next day.

The production quality increased for sure, but with it came a slew of problems. I saw raw FMS screens, with the magenta key, frequently, something that you never see in Indiana (because we use upstream key) and rarely in PNW (because they use downstream key). They also had horrible transitions between field views and FMS screens. I don't know why they didn't take down the downstream key first and then switch, but they insisted on screwing it up almost every time I looked at the scores. I know this sounds like whining, but when there are ways to make these problems go away quickly I am appalled that FIRST didn't tell the production company to get their act together. An even more glaring problem was the Einstein Energy camera that was flickering POSSIBLY because of a taut SDI cable, I can't be too sure. They had 24 Marshall cameras, one of them failing could easily be replaced, especially during Einstein. Districts like IN and PNW should not be the standard for AV, Champs should.

/rant

I have a few more problems, but that is what I feel was the most important.

[BrendanB]

Remove the current tie-breaker system for elimination rounds or altogether.

Remind volunteers it is about the teams. Nothing beats being yelled at by an inspector because we took our cart out of our pit to safely test something all while we had judges in our pit.

The plagues were a nice touch however they could use some refining as they weren't the design I would have gone with if I wanted it hanging in a corporate office.

[AustinSchuh]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

Remove the current tie-breaker system for elimination rounds or altogether.

Stepping back, why were all the elimination matches on Einstein so close? It seemed like no matter how good the teams were, the score was about the same. It would have been nice to see a couple more points differentiating the top teams.

Also, I'm starting to dislike these games where a single dead on your alliance robot either means you lose out on a bunch of ranking points, or lose the match. 2014 was tough with a dead bot, and the capture was impossible in 2016 with a dead bot. Compound that with teams taking lots of risks in their drivetrain, and you end up with more dead robots than before. When the top team in your division gets 36 RPs, and a perfect win record is only 20 RPs, bad partner luck is pretty frustrating.

I'm also noticing a trend. The games get harder and harder each year. I'd actually kind of like another game like 2014 or 2009 where we spent much less time designing our robot and could instead spend time playing with it. That would actually let us slow down, reduce burnout risk, and have more time to teach the students. No end game in 2014 was really nice. The build season almost actually ended after ship. The game was such this year that even elite teams like 254 and 1678 had off matches with robot failures. I think this points to higher and higher game and robot complexity.

FIRST claimed at CMP that this game had one of the highest ratings. I think that is mostly a reaction to 2015. This game was better than 2015, but I wouldn't put it up there as one of my favorites.

Originally Posted by BrendanB

Remind volunteers it is about the teams. Nothing beats being yelled at by an inspector because we took our cart out of our pit to safely test something all while we had judges in our pit.

Yes!!! Or having your 2 ball autonomous penalized multiple times, and when you try to figure out why, are told "we don't track penalties". Or the myriad of other variations on that. Two matches were even started with the ball that we needed to pick up having fallen off the line and onto the other side, causing us to drop from #3 to #4 seed. We were told that the ball was "close enough" when we pointed it out. Those balls were the only balls that we actually missed in autonomous during the entire event. What are we trying to encourage? I had an amazing conversation with an FTA on the practice field who really got it, and was underwhelmed by some of the volunteers on the real fields.

I spend a large amount of my non-working time mentoring the team, and a good chunk of my vacation time each year with the team. I feel like there are volunteers and others who forget that. In my view, FIRST as an organization is valuable mostly because of the community that they have built up. They should be doing everything possible to respect that community and keep them excited, engaged, and feeling respected. I had a couple interactions this year at CMP where I questioned why I'm here. I think one of my friends put it best when his answer to "why am I still here?" was that he couldn't imagine what else he would be doing.

(woah, that ended up longer than I thought...)

[CalTran]

Originally Posted by AustinSchuh

Stepping back, why were all the elimination matches on Einstein so close? It seemed like no matter how good the teams were, the score was about the same. It would have been nice to see a couple more points differentiating the top teams.

Funnily enough, at the highest levels of play, it's not too shocking to see close scores and ties. At the point, all Alliances are fully at the limit of scoring 15-18 boulders, a breach, and a capture including a scale. There's only so much you can do when playing optimally.

[BoilerMentor]

Originally Posted by Knufire

Design games where the referees aren't also scorers.

Our perspectives don't often align, but I agree with this statement. In 2015 we got scorekeepers for a game object that had to be in place at the end of the game, there was really only one scoring medium, and robots didn't really interact. In 2016 we got two distinct ways to score and robot to robot interaction (some of which could be extremely aggressive) and we didn't get score keepers.

~I feel like this should be a simple rule for GDC: If it doesn't have automated scoring and happens with a degree of frequency throughout the match, it needs a score keeper.~

I do agree some of the assessment of penalties, or the decision to not call them was inconsistent, but that comes with the very subjective nature of many of the rules this year. I hope FIRST understands that being able to see contact between robot and carpet is really, really hard most of the time.

The bumper zone situation absolutely must be addressed. There was no reason for the bumper zone to be as high as it was this year and this very rule created the situation that lead to the bulk of the red cards handed out this season.

~The total height of the bumper zone should be no more than the minimum allowable height of a standard bumper plus 2" (maybe less, that's an off the cuff estimate) and positioned in such a way as to not significantly influence the difficulty of achieving a given task in the game~

I think we could have used just a little more of a technical challenge this year.

All of this aside, I believe FIRST Stronghold may be my favorite game of all time. It was entertaining to coach and to watch. Strategy was awesome in so many ways. Robots were a manageable size. If your robot could drive, you could play a significant, strategic role.