AZ Regionals: Incorrect Scoring?

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Uki

I'm struggle to see where you came up with that idea, as many of you probably are unaware of, there were serious problems first week of regionals last year. I was up until 3am both wednesday and thursday night making the field and scoring system functional enough to run practice rounds. There have been less updates this year then last year as you might not be aware. This years software is leaps and bounds ahead of last years. Don't get me wrong, TacOps was a great idea and worked well in the end.

I have been scoring regionals for the past 6 years, this year in no way is near as bad as past years. Yes there has been some issues with rankings which is a top priority right now. I'm not sure how many of you know really what it takes to develop a piece of software like this or the time constraints that were in this particular situation.

We may very well be leaps and bounds ahead of where we were at the same time last year. The question is whether we're leaps and bounds ahead of where we were at the END of last year. It's somewhat silly to ignore all the patches and fixes that were made and the fact that at the end of champs last year, TacOPS was working much better than this Hatch system was working at the beginning of this year. To munge some old adages, if it ain't broke, don't reinvent the wheel.

If the time frame was so very very compressed and forced FIRST to go with buggy software.... Well why not spend a transitional year patching last year's TacOPS to work with 6 robots and concurrently develop and debug the Hatch system so that it can be released in full working order? There would be atleast 200 teams available for testing in off-season competitions. All FIRST would have to do is provide a field. There would be more time and less expectation of perfection. Instead, the system is being tested and debugged while it's being used. 1000+ FIRST teams have become beta testers.