Changes to rules mid-event? Rochester Regional

[purduephotog]

Good Evening-

While we were impacted one one of these this became a discussion with several other teams- and clarification, while final for the event, did not sit well.

Thus:

1) If a human player illegally retrieves an empty cell from the playing field by breaking the plane (-10 points) why is the cell not confiscated? Said player can still exchange the cell for a super cell- and thus is rewarded by +5 points should the cell be scored.

2) If a robot is DQ'd from a match at the conclusion for an illegal starting position or starting outside of the bounds, why are the points that the team scored not subtracted? (I understand the logistics of this one).

3) We watched a field reset because all 6 teams started throwing balls into the court at '3-2-1- GO' instead of the tone. No penalties were assessed (should have been -20 or -30 per side). Earlier in the day we watched 3 teams pick up 10 point penalties for getting a ball into the court at '3-2-1-GO'. Perhaps, in the future, this should be set up similar to a drag race- No announcer, just a tone.

4) Teams (forgive here) 145/1450/1405 (pick two) were playing on the same alliance. Team A was told they were being bypassed and could not touch their control station for some reason. Team B, having similar numbers, was the intended target of this statement by the field personnel and blithely tried to get their robot to go- while it just sat there. Thus two robots on the same alliance sat through the whole match. Instead of terminating the match immediately an offer of 10 points for the 'error' to the score of the next match was made... which was negotiated into a complete rematch. The other alliance still won... but this sort of case is not covered *anywhere* in the rules when a field communication error results in a non-play event.

5) Ahh- Battery Voltage. Our team was told that Control could not read our battery voltage and we would be 'bypassed' if it happened again- and we would not be allowed back on the floor to power cycle the robot nor would any of the refs undertake said action. After strong urging of the students to immediately open up a negotiation with the referees (we did not have a spare module) they offered to allow us to pass if the voltage was displayed on our DS. In all cases the voltage was displayed to the user- and in all cases the robot functioned correctly in all modes of the competition. There was never a repeat issue with the voltage. I re-read the cRio notes (lost the link just now) but 3.1.8? in the manual stated that there is a known issue with the communication just dropping out. Now, call me old fashioned, but when there is a known bug in this manner... shouldn't there be a bit more flexibility here?

This was an awesome game out there- I could not believe how the pits exploded to accommodate the extra 16 teams- it was great to have all of you here in Rochester. We really must do a home-exchange to help attract more teams... hotels are expensive!

Jason