Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative

[Rob3653]

Originally Posted by MARS_James

South Florida Regional:
This event should have been my favorite, a regional 7 minutes from my house, get to sleep in my bed, see my dog, it should have been my favorite, it turned out to be my least enjoyable event of the season. The venue had little to little to no food or drink options, heck Thursday at 1:00 I went to get a bottle of water and the concession was already closed. The parking was at the back of the venue then had to walk all the way around to the front, I get the idea was to attract foot traffic but any local would tell you that you get 0 foot traffic in front of the convention center and actually get more near the back. A lot of the volunteers were rude, I have never said that about a FIRST event but here it was true, volunteers appeared more concerned with getting home then letting teams enjoy themselves. Not all volunteers were like this but enough that is warrants mention. After Fridays award ceremony when they announced pits closed in 5 minutes most teams filed out to leave which blocked off the entrance to the pits, when I tried to walk in to put away the things my team uses in the stands I was told the pits were closed and I would not be allowed entry, despite seeing teams still working, I had a collapsible table, giant green wooden 1, 7, 9, and a box filled with stuffed alligators, I clearly am not going back there to work and actually had to have a friendly safety adviser escort me to my pit to put the stuff away. I have never been more embarrassed to be a Florida team then when interacting with the volunteers and realizing that to many of the out of state and international teams attending this is what they think most people involved in Florida FIRST are like and frankly that is unacceptable behavior, volunteers are as much, if not more, representatives of FIRST and especially the event then the teams are and should be held to and act with a higher standard. Finally once again why did we not receive chairman's feedback forms? Seriously we attended 3 regionals this season and 2 did not give feedback forms, and the one that did was the earliest and had the most teams, so I see no excuse for the other two.

2016 SFL Regional was probably one of the worst experiences I have had in my 5 years of FRC. Some of the volunteer's at the event were quite rude. We would be pulling up to the field to lift the robot and bring it to the field, and we would be yelled at for taking more than 3 seconds. Also, the queuing area was ridiculous, there was no room to move around; I am amazed at how they fit 18 robots in what seemed like a 10x10 box. The Ref'ing at both for Orlando and SFL leave a lot to be desired for, from what I saw there seemed to be a lot of missed fouls.

[MikLast]

Originally Posted by dodar

This x100000000000000000000000. What got me most interested in actually learning about other teams was listening to Dave ramble off the histories of the team's on Einstein in 2007-2010 when I was a student.

Wait this was a thing?! This must come back, I would love to hear about team histories!

[Nuttyman54]

I don't have a lot of complaints about this season. The biggest one is that, once again, reffing and scorekeeping NEED to be separated for games like this (and 2014) where there is full real-time scoring and a lot of interaction and potential fouls. It's just too much for refs to keep track of.

My second major complaint is that the field was way too complicated. I get that it was cool and the different movable defenses provided a big challenge and a lot of strategic depth, but it also made it very expensive and space-consuming to build field components for prototyping. I think half of our storage space is field parts right now, and I'm very much looking forward to reclaiming our closet. I will also echo comments that there at least needs to be an intermediate option to build team versions of components that are a better approximation for the real field. The portcullis and drawbridge specifically were WAY different. In general, dynamic game elements to not translate well to wood (ala the 2012 bridges).

I was not a fan of audience selection. The ability for large teams to influence other teams' matches is not desirable, especially since "rounds" are only approximately 1 match for all teams. 971 had the opportunity to cheer for an audience selection that wouldn't go on the field until after their final qualification match. 5803 played two consecutive matches with Rough Terrain in the middle because of a short turnaround. I get that it engages the audience, but it provides a huge strategic advantage, especially in playoffs. Also the fact that in quarterfinals, the 1v8 matchup literally has almost no time to finalize their match strategy after audience selection is absurd.

[CalTran]

Originally Posted by MikLast

Wait this was a thing?! This must come back, I would love to hear about team histories!

Last time I can actually recall an Einstein history lesson was 2010, back when it was in Atlanta, and Dave did a headstand to introduce teams. Video of it exists on Youtube. Karthik also gives good history lessons at the events he MCs at.

[jvriezen]

Originally Posted by Scott England

Design a game that is easy to officiate where it is difficult to incur accidental fouls. Especially fouls that are subjective or open to significant interpretation.

You mean like the one we had in 2015?

[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.

[Oblarg]

For the love of god, don't make teams build so many things to mock up the field again - it's hard enough to build a robot. It wasn't as bad as the 2013 pyramid, but it was close. Basically the only complaint I have about the game this year.

[leon r]

When selecting alliances, highlight the chosen team BEFORE it dissappears from the list of available teams. This should be easy to do and would add to the entertainment value!

Dance party started at 10pm, most of the kids were there since 7am and were exhausted after 15 hours! I am not sure how they can fix it, but it didn't seem right.

[TheModMaster8]

FIRST needs to enforce of rules under the robot section,

[The Swaggy P]

If there's one thing I hate the most in FRC, it's the website.
I mean, they've clearly tried to make it newbie-friendly, but at the same time, they've completely messed up routines for the thousands of people already involved in FIRST.

That, and they need an official FRC forum browser on the site itself, instead of the current 3rd-party forum system.

[TDav540]

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

There is no saving of seats. Nothing beats being yelled at by 8 people saving 30 seats when you're trying to find 5 together for your team that just got eliminated from Carver playoffs. Nothing beats the new black mom on your team being told "you don't belong here" when she's looking for a seat to watch her son in a match.

Yeah, that's terrible. I wish we could do something like pre-register for Einstein seating or something. There are only so many good seats, and so many people.........but if we were more efficient about it, I feel like we'd get a better solution for everyone

I'm gonna give a quick shoutout to team 329. They booked it up to Einstein after doing a great job in Tesla, but then when we needed seats for Einstein, they were nice enough move over a few rows and give us the seats we needed to make it work. I'm not sure I really said thank you enough, so if anyone on 329 is reading this, all of 1648 is really grateful.

[TheMilkman01]

Better PR, clearer and more consistent communication, and just overall less ambiguity. Those are my big three.

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by TheModMaster8

FIRST needs to enforce of rules under the robot section,

FIRST also needs to make some rules about interpersonal interactions. Specifically, not being a jerk to people.

[TheMilkman01]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

FIRST also needs to make some rules about interpersonal interactions. Specifically, not being a jerk to people.

I agree to some extent but I don't think people can unanimously agree on what is being a jerk and what isn't. It sounds like a more person-to-person issue that should be resolved as such.