Call Inconsistencies Between Regionals

[KarenH]

So far, I've only watched the San Diego Regional, so I haven't noticed inconsistencies between regionals. But here are the inconsistencies that I have noticed:

1) An inconsistency within the regional itself. Friday the refs were vigorously waving flags and dishing out penalties right and left. Since I wasn't extremely familiar with the game, I had a hard time figuring out what was going on at first. Then on Saturday, I was seeing violations all over the place--but the refs weren't calling most of them. Maybe it was just my subjective impression, but I really wondered if the refs were tired or something. I also wondered if maybe they were deliberately using a strategy often employed by teachers starting off a new school year: come down hard at first (Friday), let everyone know you mean business, then when the students come to heel, you can let up a bit (Saturday).

2) Inconsistencies within the game rules. For example, I had a lot of trouble understanding the penalties at first, especially this "breaking the plane" business. I read the game rules, reread them, and asked some knowledgeable people about them. I saw that "CROSSING the line" was clearly and carefully defined and explained in the DEFINITIONS and SCORING sections. I read that the entire robot or trackball had to cross the line in order to score. But people were telling me that a PENALTY would be incurred if the robot went over a line in the wrong direction, even a tiny bit. Someone referred me to G22, which supposedly says this. But no matter how hard I've looked, I've been unable to find any definition whatsoever of "break the plane," or of which plane is meant.

To a consistent way of thinking, one would assume that if a robot must completely cross the line in one direction to score, then the robot must completely cross the line in the wrong direction to receive a penalty. But that this is not the case isn't made clear anywhere in the rules that I could see; everyone but me seemed to know this out of the ether or something. The exception was one of our alliance partners in our first match, who earned us 40 points in penalties, causing us to lose the match, because they, too, did not learn this undefined rule out of the ether. So hundreds of points were lost at San Diego because of an unclear rule.

Another point: while reviewing the rules as I drafted this post, I noticed that there is no "penalties" section in the rulebook. Someone glancing at the Table of Contents for the first time might not even realize that there is a whole slew of penalties buried within the rules. It seems to me that if there's a section on how to score points, there should be a corresponding section on how to lose points. Or maybe the Penalties section should be a subset of the Scoring section. Doing this would make it easier for everyone to understand the penalties, I think.

It has occurred to me that maybe the items in #2 above were explained in a Q&A or Team Update somewhere. But if so, the clarifications were not included in the latest revision of the game rules, which I printed out the week of the regional.