Changes to rules mid-event? Rochester Regional

[wmatt2014]

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.

Teams and spectators at the Oregon Regional were certainly well-versed in field faults by the end of the competition. On the first day, we did not get anywhere near finishing the practice matches because it took anywhere from 10-20 minutes to get the field in proper communication with the robots between matches. On the second day, there were multiple replays as a result of field faults. One match (#24) was played at least 6 times by my count before an official result was decided. They eventually had to stop at match #40 and add 10 qualifications to Saturday to make up for the huge amounts of wasted time. On Saturday, everything seemed to be running smoothly through the qualifications, but when the elims came around, it field faults came back in full force. My team wasn't selected for an alliance (we are hoping to remedy that with a redesign by the time Seattle rolls along), but I believe that at least 3 of the quarterfinals were replayed, with one of the matches being replayed multiple times. I eventually left at about 4:00 because there was literally nothing going on for huge periods of time, and I don't think think that the quarters were even over by that time.

Sorry for going off on a little tangent there, but the replay was definitely the right thing to do in the case of a field fault. I don't want to start another thread or get yelled at for hijacking this one, but did anyone have experiences as ridiculous as the ones that went on in Portland in terms of the FMS and field errors described in that fourth point?