Lesson Learned 2016 - The Negative

[Jared Russell]

* The game piece (boulders) was ridiculously expensive and changed quite a bit after moderate use. 2006 poof balls remain the best foam game piece we have been given.

* This was a really onerous field to build at home.

* Refs had a tough job this year, just as in 2014. There were many missed calls and missed crossings, and lots of judgement calls around physical contact. All season, we had opponents keeping >6 balls in their driver station, and there were never enough refs to check behind the glass more than once a match.

* No parity whatsoever in division or match schedule strength at the Championship.

* FIRST's website is worse now than it was a year ago this time.

* The Championship is too long and drawn out. It is asking too much for teams to wake up at 5-6 AM and leave the venue at 7-8 PM for 4 days in a row. There's a reason why half the mentors and students on my team have gotten sick after returning several years running.

* It would have been nice to have wooden goals scattered throughout the divisions, since dialing in shooters seemed to be the most common use-case for the (centralized) practice fields.

* I thought the scoring display was really confusing all season long.

* I did not think that the 8 division Einstein format was great this year. I would have loved to see 4 alliances that were deeper/stronger instead.

* This was the last unified FIRST World Championship

[Rangel(kf7fdb)]

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

* The Championship is too long and drawn out. It is asking too much for teams to wake up at 5-6 AM and leave the venue at 7-8 PM for 4 days in a row. There's a reason why half the mentors and students on my team have gotten sick after returning several years running.

Especially for the scouters and I that try very hard to get good seats in the morning, I can attest to this. Not sure how to solve it though. I'm very happy that they got rid of opening only one door in the morning and went to opening all of them before letting people in. This allowed us to wake up a bit later in order to get good seats. I have to say it's still probably the closest thing to a Black Friday zombie breakthrough than anything I've ever been a part of. Perhaps assigned team seating is the solution to this?

Another idea I had is even though the split is happening, have 8 fields on the field still and just have two per division in order to speed up the flow of matches and maybe make qualifications last a shorter amount of time.

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by Andrew Schreiber

It was also terrible.

Eh. It's not the best, but did you try the app last year? I think it was a huge improvement, unlike the navigation on the website.

Originally Posted by Jared Russell

* This was the last unified FIRST World Championship

This still pisses me off, and will continue to do so until such a time that FIRST goes back to a single event. I want to rant about this, but I'll leave it alone for now.