FRC rules around seating need to change.

[gblake]

Originally Posted by bduddy

Quite frankly, a blanket "no saving seats" rule is not reasonable in the face of many common scenarios, such as:

-Teams or their guests arriving at different times
-Parts of teams temporarily leaving their seats for, say, lunch, the pits, or even the bathroom

There needs to be new rules that properly balance these needs against the understandable concern to not have the entire seating area partitioned on Thursday, with no room for guests or later attendees. I'm not sure what it is, but...

Quite frankly, in your first point, you appear to making an assumption that (IMO) is not reasonable. The assumption I think I see is that if some non-trivial parts of teams, or some non-trivial numbers of team guests, arrive later than others; that the rest of the world has to allow them all to sit with whatever part of that team sat down first, and/or allow them all to sit at the most favorable location any team member claimed.

What the rule says (implies) is that when folks arrive late, they can either form a new group that sits wherever seats are open, or the entire group (both the original- and later-arrivals) can move as much as is necessary to find a large-enough block(s) of seats.

This is precisely the point. I am more than confident that whoever wrote the No Saving Seats rule was 100% aware of your first scenario, and wrote the rule to expressly forbid a "saving seats" response to it.

If people stop saving seats for folks who are arriving "later" , I think the second point you make will very nearly disappear. There might be a few things left to iron out (especially around the lunchtime topic), but I predict the big picture will be much improved.

Blake