Lessons learned 2005: The negative

[rocknthehawk]

I had an awesome time.....the only thing i really disliked was the walk to the playing field. I agree with what was said before....if you are on the pit crew and drive team, there was no time to do anything inbetween. The walk made the game boring in a sense...we had to walk 10 minutes just to get to the field, and then wait another ten before we even got onto the field, just to play for 2 minutes, and then make another ten minute walk back. It made me not even want to go out for practice matches.

Another dislike that was no problem by FIRST was the final matches. (i didn't see the final match or two because iw as busy crating up our bot). It seemed the finals were just capping matches, who could cap more higher and quicker. WHERE WAS THE DEFENSE??? It seemed like every match was the same...not too entertaining.

I guess there is one last thing i thought of while typing. It was waiting during the finals on our field. Since we were 13th or whatever, they said we had to wait, because if two robots broke, we would be allowed in. We had to sit and wait in the back with our bot for the finals on Curie, and the finals on Einstein until Curie was eliminated....i think that sytem could use work, but i guess there isn't much you can change.

[Cory]

I still don't understand why people are complaining about penalties. How hard is it to stay the heck away from a robot that's in a loading zone?

It absolutely baffles me that after four months of knowing that you WILL get a penalty if you hit someone in the loading zone, people still haven't figured out that you don't push a robot that's loading.

As I said before, and I'll say again, it's really not that hard to avoid penalties.

It'd sure be nice to hear everyone complaining about inconsistency between regionals offer some suggestions to remedy the problem (thank you, Amy, for being constructive)

Head refs are volunteers also, not FIRST staff. You could not possibly standardize the sets of head refs across the nation. It would not be right for FIRST to ask them to devote even more time away from their jobs/family/etc. Unless someone figures out how to make 30 clones of Benge, it isn't happening. There will always be discrepancies when humans are involved.

Updated versions of the game rules were distributed to all refs at nationals. They had the team updates incorporated into the text of the rules, and important Q&A answers in the back. They also included a list of all possible situations that warranted penalties/disables/dq's.

It would be nice if FIRST officials were active on CD, but why should they want to be when volunteers are attacked left and right? Look what happened last time FIRST did something for us. They got stabbed in the back by a group of people discussing how to hack the manual.

CD is not an official medium for releasing game decisions, and any discussion on CD will not be seen by the majority of FIRST, causing even MORE issues.

also all of the peopl e that went to the drivers meeting could see how many important problems were discusses BUT none of these conclusions the refees ingeniously came up with were used when the penalities they talked about occured

- The drivers meeting was great, but it seemed like "We're gonna call these following things, for these reasons" which was all great, but the next day nothing was called!

I don't know what you saw, but I find that extremely hard to believe. In addition, to be completely blunt, a good number of questions asked at the drivers meeting were quite stupid, and made me wonder if half the drive teams had even thoroughly read the rules.

Suggestions for next year-

*Hire Dean a speechwriter. Seriously.
*Limit all speeches to a maximum of 5-10 minutes. I fell asleep twice before the finals on Einstein.
*Do the opening ceremonies Saturday, not Friday. At least play the national anthems Saturday morning.
*Do not let the opening ceremonies run late, delaying matches.
*Make sure all signage at events has the new FIRST logo (I can understand why they did not this year)
*Limit the number of people with field access.
*Work on answering Q&A questions more clearly. Many times it seemed FIRST did not give an entirely straight answer when the intent was obvious but not spelled out crystal clear.
*Similarly, to help FIRST, make sure your Q&A questions are crystal clear.
*One of my larger gripes-bring back the ability to disable robots through the scoring software By the time a referee decides a robot needs to be disabled, makes sure they have the team number right, tells the head ref, and finally slaps the E-stop, the match is over, or near to it. This is a safety hazard
*Another big peeve of mine was the fact that rankings were never shown on the field throughout the weekend at nationals, or any of the three regionals I attended, unlike previous years. PLEASE start doing this again. Having to walk all the way to the pits to see the rankings is fairly annoying, and impossible if you're volunteering on the field.

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by Alex Cormier

one thing i regretted the most was. the 40 minute waste of time for the robot to go out to the match, wait, play the match and then return to the pits. I had our robot stay out by he filed for a few matches on Friday and i thought it was a great idea until i realized thee is no one in the pits to talk to judges or other teams. this problem should be addressed. the walk for the robots was horrible but not the walk for humans. i believe the walk for robots should/must be shorter then humans. good day. im tired.

you obviously didnt go to Houston... (a measured mile)

[suneel112]

The only real complaint I had was that huge black tarp at the top of the Georgia Dome. I don't know about the rest of you, but I like sunlit robot matches. As for the game, I agree that there were less things to do than last year, but there were also advantages. The penalties were a definite advantage over last year, because defense should not include ramming or tipping over.

[Kims Robot]

I think most of my issues that should be worked on are here, but I will reiterate a few, and add a few here.

1. Consistancy of penalties (especially within regionals... nevermind even between regionals). There were several calls that I saw made that were not made in a previous match, or on a previous day, and this made it hard for teams to keep their cool.

2. Announce the penalties!! It was impossible for people who were not in the game or on the field to tell what the penalties were for or who got them. This is important for people just coming in to watch the competition, as well as for scouting.

3. Consistancy of inspections. At Buckeye, they tried to force us to have a "safety inspection" which was 3/4 of the real inspection, before we were even allowed to go out on thursday to practice. This is absurd and not in the rules. You better bet I argued my way out of that one! And a smaller one is to have the inspectors actually read THIS years rules... we had an inspector in Atlanta try to fail us because he said we could not put a 40Amp breaker on a window motor(10AWG on a speed controller). Rule 83 specifically states that any breaker can be used with any motor... it allows teams to do their own engineering. I know in the past that was true, but it wasnt THIS year. ::sigh::

4. More exits at the final social event. I get the one entrance thing... but the exit was as far from our hotel as it could be, and got incredibly congested. They could have allowed teams to exit through other locations. We went to one spot where we just saw 5 members of another team exit, and a cop got all huffy with us and said it wasnt an exit (despite the fact that we had just watched another team walk through there).

5. Better organization of the FLL shadowing at the championships. There were a lot of teams that wanted to offer to have an FLL team shadow them, but with no coordination (mentors had to email FLL teams to see if they wanted shadowing), and a very late notification, many of us were unable to help out.

That brings me to my final and largest suggestion:
6. FIRST needs to create a forum where THEY can ASK for help. Anything that they have trouble getting done, I am certain that there are many of us out here that would be willing to help... if we only knew they needed the help (with enough notice). It could be as simple as sending an email to all of the team leaders when they come across something they need help with, or something a little more like the Q&A or TIMS where certain people can sign in and look at the needs that FIRST has. We would have taken on the organization of the FLL thing, but didnt have a clue it was needed until too late.

*edit* Oh yeah and I was reminded by another post...
7. Bring back Robot stop buttons... make sure every team has a disable button, and disable buttons are easily accessible to refs. In toronto, a robot threw a tetra at our drivers, and was not disabled until 30 seconds later, when the ref pulled their human player off the pad. At our scrimmage, we had two people with three shut off switches (one for each team) watching each allaince, and if there were any times that safety came into question, they were to shut the robot off immediately. (matches can be rerun, people take much longer to be fixed!)

[Aaron]

I think all the negatives about the nationals have been said ( i especially agree with the Vex FLL safty glass issue). As for this entire year, i think that three teams was great, but the field should be a little bit bigger (maybe a square?). I also think some of the regionals need to get bigger venues, instead of just splitting them up into more regionals. I also like the e stop idea. its been four years since a team could 'punch out' in an emergency. The last thing would be to allow teams to challange calls if they have sufficient evidence, such as cued up video tape, and can present it to the refs in a short amount of time (3 min or less).

[Spikey]

Not a lot of gripes, most have been stated already but from what I noticed that on the Newton field the refs were being very stingy with penalties. I saw a lot of things happen that would have been called a penalty at a regional, but they did not make the call at Newton field, especially tipping!
Not to harp on penalties again but the 30 point penalty for hitting a robot is a little extreme, especially when its unintentional. We were in the QF at Newton and as we were backing up from a goal we brushed a robot in the loading zone, 30 point penalty, it was not malicious, it did not endanger the human player, its hard to see all the way on the other side of the field. The penalty cost our alliance the match and I don't like the idea of penalties being that severe. When they had floppies and HP interaction with robots they had very few penalties at all and at most they were 10 point penalties. When the penalties cost as many as 10 tetras it becomes unproductive, and makes the game less exciting.
Maybe FIRST should reconsider how much weight the penalties are given. Other then that I had a lot of fun

[devicenull]

The pits:
Too far away. Closer then last year for people, possibly for robots also, but its simply too far away. I *believe* there is a large parking garage next to the stadium. Whats wrong with having them there, assuming you put some kind of weather protection up?
Don't let spectators into the pit, but don't restrict the teams from having people in the pit. Possibly distribute the wrist bands the first day, and require them to be allowed into the pit. I saw lots of little kids running around, with robots moving all over the place and power tools in use. Not a good thing, more so when you are pushing safety this year.

Comptetion:
An overhead camera might be better for displaying the matches on the screens.
Posssibly have an offical video recording of all the matches. We had one match where the scores were totally wrong, and they wouldn't let us argue it (They said we had 9 points, when we were able to score 12pts at one time, no penalties that match)
Closing ceremonies was way too long. I was falling asleep sitting there.
Provide a place down on the floor for teams to cheer. Teams standing every match made it hard to see.
Stagger the lunch times. Waiting in a 40 minute line for food is not acceptable. This is perhaps the easiest thing to do, and I hope someone from FIRST takes notice.

Other:
We had run a Cat5 cable through our hotel hallway.. it was on the side of the hallway, and only ran infront of our rooms, but some team kept yanking on it, then I heard them talking about cutting it. Not a good thing to be doing.
Ramps on robots shouldn't be allowed, imo. We don't want to flip anyone by accident.
Expand the aisles between the pits. It was a bit hard to get through them when you had teams gathered outside their pit.

Originally Posted by suneel112

The only real complaint I had was that huge black tarp at the top of the Georgia Dome. I don't know about the rest of you, but I like sunlit robot matches.

The CMU camera does not deal well with changing lighting conditions. It would make it useless if the matches were lit by the sun.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Briefly about penalties. Teams didn't have 4 months to figure out what would and wouldn't be penalized. The penalties were changing up until the Driver's Meeting on Thursday where it was announced that a robot could, in fact, sit in a loading zone and score on the nearby goal with utter impugnity. Contrary to the original statement in the rules that loading zones aren't meant to be safety areas to protect a team while they were doing things besides loading a tetra.

Kudos to Kim for #6, though. That's a great idea.

Also, growl on people still complaining about Houston. It wasn't Houston's fault and I really wish you'd stop it already.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Kims Robot

7. Bring back Robot stop buttons... make sure every team has a disable button, and disable buttons are easily accessible to refs. In toronto, a robot threw a tetra at our drivers, and was not disabled until 30 seconds later, when the ref pulled their human player off the pad. At our scrimmage, we had two people with three shut off switches (one for each team) watching each allaince, and if there were any times that safety came into question, they were to shut the robot off immediately. (matches can be rerun, people take much longer to be fixed!)

Originally Posted by Aaron

I also like the e stop idea. its been four years since a team could 'punch out' in an emergency. The last thing would be to allow teams to challange calls if they have sufficient evidence, such as cued up video tape, and can present it to the refs in a short amount of time (3 min or less).

I don't understand what you're saying. Every alliance station has three E-stop buttons that team members can press at any time. These have been there the last four years. My complaint is that referees now have to use these buttons to disable a robot, instead of the scorekeeper disabling them through the scoring software.

Sorry, but FIRST will NEVER allow referees to review video. It would be an absolute nightmare. It would take a week to run a regional. Will never happen, for good reason.

Originally Posted by Kevin Sevcik

Briefly about penalties. Teams didn't have 4 months to figure out what would and wouldn't be penalized.

Teams absolutely did have 4 months to figure out that if you hit a robot that is in a loading zone, you will be penalized.

[AmyPrib]

Originally Posted by Cory

It absolutely baffles me that after four months of knowing that you WILL get a penalty if you hit someone in the loading zone, people still haven't figured out that you don't push a robot that's loading.

Updated versions of the game rules were distributed to all refs at nationals. They had the team updates incorporated into the text of the rules, and important Q&A answers in the back. They also included a list of all possible situations that warranted penalties/disables/dq's.

It would be nice if FIRST officials were active on CD, but why should they want to be when volunteers are attacked left and right? Look what happened last time FIRST did something for us. They got stabbed in the back by a group of people discussing how to hack the manual.

CD is not an official medium for releasing game decisions, and any discussion on CD will not be seen by the majority of FIRST, causing even MORE issues.

In addition, to be completely blunt, a good number of questions asked at the drivers meeting were quite stupid, and made me wonder if half the drive teams had even thoroughly read the rules.

I think people know not to hit anyone in the loading zone, but there are accidental hits, due to visibility, or not seeing the robot is "in" the loading zone, or because of close proximity of the loading zone to a corner goal where it's tighter to maneuver, for example. And after the late G15 rule change, it made it more possible to draw a penalty when technically you weren't loading a tetra.

It's good to hear that rules were at Nationals - hopefully they are available at regionals in the future. I think the separate Updates should also be available, as there was an issue with the full G15 update not being incorporated into the rules correctly, which caused an issue at at least one regional. So if that happens again, there could be issues. I think refs need to be more familiar with the rules and Updates than teams are, and that hasn't been the case in some situations.

I didn't intend for CD to be the official game release decisions, but they could be providing feedback, or acknowledge there are issues they are working on, so that people don't feel as if they're making suggestions or asking questions that go into a black hole. It's tough to be arguing back and forth over something, and not have any clue whether or not FIRST is addressing it or even know that it's a concern. If there were FIRST officials that were to be active, it could possibly be a moderated section so they don't get attacked, but they shouldn't shy away from good debate or arguments on topics.

Perhaps instead of being active on CD, FIRST could implement a "suggestion" system, similar to Q/A, where we can all post these ideas directly to them, and they can respond with some sort of feedback. But is there somebody from FIRST that knows I'm making this suggestion and to possibly consider it? I think there needs to be a way where people can get feedback directly from FIRST for improvements. If FIRST isn't willing to accept the suggestions and perhaps act on some (which I think they would), then we have a problem. But we need to know that FIRST is hearing us.

I agree on silly questions - I am amazed at some of the ones I read on Q/A. Maybe FIRST should moderate the Q/As for ones that are blatantly answered in the rules. I have never received an answer via email from Q/A even though it says I will, so maybe they can start using that when silly questions are asked, and reduce the number of Qs everyone else has to read through. Some say "no question is a stupid question", and I agree to an extent - just please read the rules first!
Well, some of this may have gone off topic a little. Sorry.

[Alex Cormier]

Originally Posted by Stephen Kowski

It is disappointing the biggest problems you all can find is within one volunteer. I am very disappointed....did you have a problem with one of the other volunteers also? possibly a field reseter? a judge? or maybe an inspector? I find it very upsetting that rather than be happy someone is here volunteering, you all would rather disparage the man's performance.....how sad....

well a few other of the volunteers on wed. night where we could uncrate the robot were NOT very GPly and were just plain rude. we were told "trying is not good enough". "Get out", "Go away". i can understand it if we were there longer then scheduling permits us but no we were hearing all of this before they closed at 9. isn't a point of FIRST GP?

[Paul Copioli]

Since all the negatives I have come up with are already here, I will not list any. However, the liquid rules are a HUGE problem.

Cory,

Here is your response in this thread:

I still don't understand why people are complaining about penalties. How hard is it to stay the heck away from a robot that's in a loading zone?

It absolutely baffles me that after four months of knowing that you WILL get a penalty if you hit someone in the loading zone, people still haven't figured out that you don't push a robot that's loading.

As I said before, and I'll say again, it's really not that hard to avoid penalties

I think you are toting the company line a bit too much here. Let me tell you that in order to avoid penalties, you must understand what gets you the penalty in the first place. The definitions of "in the loading zone" and "in the process of receiving a tetra" changed several times this season. They even changed after the regionals were over. They even changed at the driver's meeting at the Championship.

Did you know that at the driver's meeting Benji actually said that a robot could sit in the loading zone and score tetras and if another robot hit them, then it would be a penalty. I was there, I heard it and couldn't believe what I was hearing.

Did you know that a team could sit in the loading zone and not be in the act of loading a tetra (obvious to everyone) and draw a foul from a team obviously going toward a far goal to score? This happened several times at the Championship and changed the way my team played the game. If you don't believe me, look at the tapes of elimination rounds in Detroit where 245 and 217 were on the same team and we went across the field a lot. Then look a the tapes from the Championship where 245 and 217 didn't go across even once due to the fear of penalties. My team's behavior was changed by the "liquid" rules of FIRST and it is my #1 priority to help fix this problem next year.

[Cory]

Originally Posted by Paul Copioli

Since all the negatives I have come up with are already here, I will not list any. However, the liquid rules are a HUGE problem.

Cory,

Here is your response in this thread:



I think you are toting the company line a bit too much here. Let me tell you that in order to avoid penalties, you must understand what gets you the penalty in the first place. The definitions of "in the loading zone" and "in the process of receiving a tetra" changed several times this season. They even changed after the regionals were over. They even changed at the driver's meeting at the Championship.

Did you know that at the driver's meeting Benji actually said that a robot could sit in the loading zone and score tetras and if another robot hit them, then it would be a penalty. I was there, I heard it and couldn't believe what I was hearing.

Did you know that a team could sit in the loading zone and not be in the act of loading a tetra (obvious to everyone) and draw a foul from a team obviously going toward a far goal to score? This happened several times at the Championship and changed the way my team played the game. If you don't believe me, look at the tapes of elimination rounds in Detroit where 245 and 217 were on the same team and we went across the field a lot. Then look a the tapes from the Championship where 245 and 217 didn't go across even once due to the fear of penalties. My team's behavior was changed by the "liquid" rules of FIRST and it is my #1 priority to help fix this problem next year.

I see what you're saying here, Paul. I didn't think you would be allowed to score a tetra while in the zone still (How can you score a tetra, if you haven't finished loading it, by FIRST's definition of loading?)

With regards to the second half of your post, Update 15 or whatever it was changed the definition of loading to be "when the robot has left the zone", not when it has finished receiving the tetra from the loader. Personally, I don't like that, and I agree with you that teams received penalties because of it, and that it really wasn't against the spirit of the rule, but it had to be called because that's what the word of the rules said.

[Billfred]

Originally Posted by Koko Ed

Things that did not go so well this year were..
- The scoring software. It really damaged the flow of the cometition and often sealed off the flow of information on alot of regionals.
- The penalties. The 30 point penalty is perhaps a bit excessive considering it's harder to score this year.
- The return of Sir Charles. 'nuff said.
- The lack of respect the animation, website, Inventor and Woodie Flowers award got at the championship. What they're not good enough for the main award cermony?
- The finals were too long. Those two speeches did not help. The flow was all out of whack.
- The food at the afterparty was not so hot.

By and large, this is my list. I personally enjoyed Sir Charles when he was on Curie--he's just got that something that makes him an enjoyable announcer. And I didn't go to the wrap party (it was already 11:00 PM when I got home), so I can't comment on the food.

As for the awards and speeches, I'd personally drop one speech for next year, then move in the Friday morning awards. That didn't sit well with me either.

Penalties were meh. I'm reminded of the old saying "A good driver knows the limits of his machine; a great driver has a machine with no limits." FIRST knew the limits of safe human-robot interaction, and designed penalties accordingly. However, I'd be ecstatic to see a game next year where that safety issue was minimized or eliminated. (Imagine a HP setup somewhere between this year and FIRST Frenzy in reverse, with HPs putting game pieces into play from behind lots of lexan and aluminum, and you get my concept.)

Outside of that, and this is rather silly, I do kinda wish the gamepieces were usable elsewhere. Bins you can use to store stuff (I've got six in here right now), balls can be bounced, shot, and thrown at freshmen to motivate them to work--but what can you use a nine-pound tetra for? This is gonna take some thought.