Lessons Learned - The Negative

[martin417]

After my second year of involvement with FIRST, I still have the same complaint. I understand that while COOPERTITION is way of FIRST (now trademarked and patented), this is, at its heart, a COMPETITION (otherwise, why keep score?). I understand that it's not about winning, but teams DO want to win the competition. Besides punishing teams for doing well (G14), there is the random, or "luck" factor. If a team works hard, and makes a great robot that meets the goals of the competition better than other teams, they should be rewarded. At every regional I attended, including championships, The seedings did not reflect the ability of the robots or the teams. If FIRST wants this to be a "sport", and be as popular as football, they need to come up with a better way to rank teams prior to alliance pairings. I have no problem with the serpentine draft and the no refusal rules, I see how that can prevent "super alliances", and make scouting important. I do have a problem with some of the best teams not even being in the top 8. Throughout the season, I saw teams that could not score at all ranked as the number one seed, while top scoring bots were not even in the top 10. Perhaps the seeding should be done based on the scoring of the bots rather than a win-loss record.

I don't have all the answers, but the questions remain. As many smart people as there are involved with FIRST, I am confident that they can come up with something better.

[nahstobor]

Bring the district format to Virginia

[RyanN]

What did everyone think about the new control system?

Maybe some criticism will help NI and FIRST make the system better for next year if your team ran into any problems.

[Dmentor]

Originally Posted by nahstobor

Bring the district format to Virginia

Amen. Although I tend to think of this as a positive for the Michigan District format rather than a negative for the traditional regionals. The extra competitions, more matches per competition and selection process was really apparent (at least to this viewer) at the Championship. As much as I loved the DC and NASA/VCU regionals this year, I hope that Virginia follows the Michigan model soon.

[BJT]

Just one thing, the TV screen that shows everyones ranking and win/loss record is really hard to follow when it jumps a few lines every few seconds. As soon as you find your number it moves and you lose it. It would be easier to follow if it could smoothly scroll through the rankings.

[Doug G]

1) The game this year was really hard to follow and not that fun to watch. Most of the time, especially in elims, you could not tell who was winning. In a couple of elim matches all the bots were pinned in the corners for most of a match. Boring. Games need a couple of central places where scoring happens. 2008 had two hurdling areas centrally located, 2007 had the rack, etc..

2) The playing surface really leveled the field and G14 was not required at all.

3) 40 lb allowance was great, THANK YOU!! However, 6 week build season now becomes an 8-10 week season for some and since some teams basically redesigned and rebuilt devices between events; we are treading into more sticky situations in future years if this continues. I attended 3 events (2 as a coach, and one as a spectator) and none of them enforced / checked the 40 lb allowances. I know GP was in place and can't think of any exceptions, but I know the GP boundaries will be pushed further in the future.

4) The DS seems a bit delicate and could use some improvements to beef it up. Don't get em wrong, what WPI has done is really amazing - but it could be a bit more durable.

[shgshgshgshg]

I think that FIRST need a more diverse game. It almost seemed like this year that every other robot did the same thing, and only the most experienced and wealthy teams that can afford the best parts seem to be able to win. The other problem I have is the charge for Atlanta. Our team knew before even going to our regional that even if we won we would not be going to the championship due to lack of money. There needs to be some sort of fund to help rookie, or struggling teams keep a team, because as of right now we do not know if the team will exist next year...

[MikeReilly]

Love the ideas on fixing the "no show" problem. As mentioned in another post by a team mentor of ours, there was a regional where a robot missed the first 4 matches and was ranked #1 since they had not lost. They ended up ranked 6th at the end.

I think there are other remedies as well:
If you're in cue/q/queue(?), and your opponent is missing one, you get to pick from the previous alliance that left, they don't. Bring a spare battery.

Or, in "graciousness", your team chooses to leave a team from your alliance off the floor. That's the easiest, closest to "gracious profoopertition" you can get. Is "profoopertition" trademarked yet?

[MishraArtificer]

At the Great Lakes Regional (cough, cough) Michigan State Championships, the driver's stations kept dying Mysteriously. Turns out they weren't grounded for static charges: the plastic wheels running on the regolith surface was popping the driver's stations all weekend.

First, GROUND THEM!

[Herodotus]

Another thing I remember now. Could we get a more readable font for alliance selection and the brackets being projected up on the big screen? It's always pretty tough to read the numbers.

[Tottanka]

Originally Posted by MishraArtificer

At the Great Lakes Regional (cough, cough) Michigan State Championships, the driver's stations kept dying Mysteriously. Turns out they weren't grounded for static charges: the plastic wheels running on the regolith surface was popping the driver's stations all weekend.

First, GROUND THEM!

i wouldn't worry about that, regolith and rover wheels are not returning.

[DarkFlame145]

G14, was unneeded as many have said before. Also one thing that I have noticed from 2006 on is that FRC is starting to get soft, first with the bumpers and now with the Themed game. I miss the older days (2005 back) where it was metal on metal slamming into each other. One more thing I think FIRST is making too many robot design rules, so the robots are becoming bland, look-a-likes.

[AlexD744]

Well I would like to see matches replayed if there were feild prolems. Our first qualifier was lost because our robot, which had communication, which worked right before we left the pit and right after we returned, did not move the whole match, the match did not ount for us, however, that looks exactly like a los because no points are given. Also, could alliance pairings for qualifications be a bit more even.

[Daniel_LaFleur]

Originally Posted by martin417

After my second year of involvement with FIRST, I still have the same complaint. I understand that while COOPERTITION is way of FIRST (now trademarked and patented), this is, at its heart, a COMPETITION (otherwise, why keep score?). I understand that it's not about winning, but teams DO want to win the competition. Besides punishing teams for doing well (G14), there is the random, or "luck" factor. If a team works hard, and makes a great robot that meets the goals of the competition better than other teams, they should be rewarded. At every regional I attended, including championships, The seedings did not reflect the ability of the robots or the teams. If FIRST wants this to be a "sport", and be as popular as football, they need to come up with a better way to rank teams prior to alliance pairings. I have no problem with the serpentine draft and the no refusal rules, I see how that can prevent "super alliances", and make scouting important. I do have a problem with some of the best teams not even being in the top 8. Throughout the season, I saw teams that could not score at all ranked as the number one seed, while top scoring bots were not even in the top 10. Perhaps the seeding should be done based on the scoring of the bots rather than a win-loss record.

I don't have all the answers, but the questions remain. As many smart people as there are involved with FIRST, I am confident that they can come up with something better.

While I agree that this is a competition, the rest of your statement I must, respectfully, disagree with.

1) <G14> is not a punishment. It is a conditional statement and one that the teams can control. A failure of a team to not control their own scoring, and thus invoke the 2x or 3x condition, just means that that team is not paying attention well enough (with very few exceptions).

2) There is no "no refusal" rule, but there is a "refuse and you cannot be picked again" rule. This rule is strategic in nature.

3) The game is not about scoring. The game is about your alliance having more points than your opponents alliance. Have you ever considered that those 'non-scoring' robots are picking because they make their whole alliance better?

And now back to the thread:
My biggest concern this year was the number of 'redos' and the lack of information getting back to the teams in question as to why they were happening.

[sdcantrell56]

Originally Posted by Daniel_LaFleur

While I agree that this is a competition, the rest of your statement I must, respectfully, disagree with.

1) <G14> is not a punishment. It is a conditional statement and one that the teams can control. A failure of a team to not control their own scoring, and thus invoke the 2x or 3x condition, just means that that team is not paying attention well enough (with very few exceptions).

And I will have to disagree with this. At the regionals we attended, the real time scoring was not accurate enough to be able to stop scoring to avoid a G14. We had one match where the score at the end of the match showed us winning 46 to 34. After the volunteers had finished there official count the final score showed us with 109 to 36. I completely agree that if we had seen that the score was what it actually was we could have slowed down our scoring or scored on ourselves. However, as it was there is no way I as the coach was going to tell our drive team to slow down when we only had a 12 point lead. This happened throughout our matches, and because of this, there was no way I would call off our drive team no matter what the real time scoring said. Additionally, teams are picked based off of scouting, which this year was primarily based on how many balls you could score versus how many were scored on you. If we were capable of scoring 25-30 balls in a match, then we would absolutely do it so that we would be the most appealing team to other scouts if for some reason we did not seed in the top 8.

Additionally this whole idea of punishing our students by not allowing them to perform to there full potential just because they put in more time or effort than others is ridiculous. Teams should be rewarded for building truly impressive robots and should be allowed to play to there full potential no matter what. I have been involved with FIRST for a while now and have been a part of teams with very good robots and very awful robots. I know in my rookie year when we were beaten very badly, I never once felt bad about myself, and instead took it as a challenge to not let that happen next year. After improving from year to year, I am finally a part of a team that builds incredible robots, and it is because we have very good, dedicated students and mentors.

I do feel that FIRST has gotten "soft" in the past few years with various rules to try to level the playing field. This is a competition, and the competition aspect is what draws the majority of people, and especially spectators to the event. There is no other sport that penalizes a team for being stronger than there opponent, and I hope FIRST gets away from this silly practice in the future.

As a whole I did enjoy this game very much and I liked the complexity of building a truly competitive robot to accomplish the various intricacies of this game.