**FIRST EMAIL**/Important – Team Update #1

[David Brinza]

Yeah!! Death to Rule <G36>!! Perhaps the most hated rule ever (OK, this year)!!

[mateus]

Well... using something that Dean said... "when $@#$@#$@#$@# happens" it must be cleaned...

It's good to see that first is always ready to listen the teams... and in such a short time... that was a realy messing rule...

Can't wait for the regionals to see the game being plaed...

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by petek

I think day one is an okay compromise.

I agree.

Although <G36> certainly added some very interesting dilemmas to the game, it did cause some unnecessary complications as well. We'll have an easier season because of this one deletion.

Don

[Jonathan Norris]

I think everyone here would like to say: Thank you FIRST you totally got it right this time!

[Gabe15]

G36...that was easy to settle!

I thought there was going to be a riot or global robot wars or something over that rule.

[vhcook]

I really appreciate the GDC responding to this so quickly.

In my professional experience, no technical document of this length and complexity is ever perfect in the first draft released to a large population, no matter how much peer review and checking you do. There's always something found when people who weren't on the design team start looking, and we are a huge group of highly motivated reviewers.

I'm always amazed at the thought and attention to detail that goes into making these strange and complicated games. Now that they've taken the degree of difficulty down a notch from nearly impossible to do everything to just extraordinarily difficult, I think it's going to be a great game. If we play it well, it should be a lot of fun to watch, too.

Thanks, FIRST!

[Arefin Bari]

Thank you, FIRST.

[d.courtney]

To be honest I was hoping G36 would have stayed. It would have forced teams to be even that much more innovative in how they got that ball down without being over 6 feet in height. The most obvious way was to hit it from underneath with the other ball. But there are 3 or 4 that I thought up the past two days.

[Kevin Kolodziej]

Personally, I think the note at the end of the update refers to everything except G36. No one here, except Dave, knows whether that was an oversight or not. I'm led to believe that it was a rule that was revised prior to kickoff but not included in the final manual due to the fact that both the animation and the mock game included robots extending above 6'. That's just a guess though.

I'm sad to see it go. I thought that it was a unique challenge and really promoted scoring and made it very difficult to maximize points in hybrid mode. Now that it has been eliminated, there are many more defensive possibilities that are completely legal...not necessarily a bad thing, but not necessarily in the original intent of the game either. While I welcome an easier hybrid mode, I'm still shocked to see this drastic a change.

[Optimizer]

I'm a rookie, but was a bit surprised at some of the slopiness I noticed. It just doesn't bode well when the word "stretch" is spelled three different ways in the same paragraph (Sect. 6.2.1., 2nd to last paragraph). I would have expected that a simple spell check would have been done, for something like this.

Well, at least they've resolved some key problems with great speed. Thanks, GDC!

[Otaku]

I almost want to make a shirt that says "R.I.P., <G36>"

That being said, I like the fact it's gone. A lot less to worry about now.

[Barry Bonzack]

Originally Posted by d.courtney

To be honest I was hoping G36 would have stayed. It would have forced teams to be even that much more innovative in how they got that ball down without being over 6 feet in height. The most obvious way was to hit it from underneath with the other ball. But there are 3 or 4 that I thought up the past two days.

We are in a small crowd. I was looking forward to seeing robots hurdle over the opponents' overpass, or raising one trackball up to knock off the other. Also it would have been interesting to see how many teams would have taken the 10 pt penalty to keep other teams from getting 12 points in the end game as many here speculated.

[Nate Laverdure]

Originally Posted by Optimizer

I'm a rookie, but was a bit surprised at some of the slopiness I noticed. It just doesn't bode well when the word "stretch" is spelled three different ways in the same paragraph (Sect. 6.2.1., 2nd to last paragraph). I would have expected that a simple spell check would have been done, for something like this.

Well, at least they've resolved some key problems with great speed. Thanks, GDC!

The HOME STRETCH for the red ALLIANCE is the one immediately in front of the red ALLIANCE ZONE, and
the HOME STRECTH for the blue ALLIANCE is the one immediately in front of the blue ALLIANCE ZONE.
The HOME STRECTCH is bounded by the FINISH LINE for the ALLIANCE, the LANE DIVIDER/LANE MARKER, the Alliance Station Wall and the Guardrail System.

Have you considered that perhaps the manual is defining three different HOME STRETCHes? "Sorry, ref. We thought we were in the home strecth. Now it's clear that we were in the home strectch. We're sorry; it won't happen again."

All in all, I'm impressed, as always, with the quality of the manual and the speed with which the FIRST leadership moved to correct any errors. Thank you so much!

[cbale2000]

Originally Posted by Otaku

I almost want to make a shirt that says "R.I.P., <G36>"

That being said, I like the fact it's gone. A lot less to worry about now.

Hows this work for you?





Couldn't resist.


The funny thing is, I might actually wear that shirt if someone gave me one!

[Gary Dillard]

Still no mention of a source to purchase Trackballs. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr........