2010 Lesson Learned: The Negative

[Chickenonastick]

The fact that we received 89 penalities in one match due to DOGMAR explains most of my complaints.

[waialua359]

Originally Posted by Chickenonastick

The fact that we received 89 penalities in one match due to DOGMAR explains most of my complaints.

This post says it all!
And disagree with the so-called no bonus of autonomous. Starving an opposing alliance and scoring points was absolutely a difference maker in matches at CMP.

[Isaac501]

The Game: Having a week one regional with this game was horrific. Penalties coming out the ying-yang and many of them, after the next Team Update, never would have been called. A lot of week1 teams got hosed by bad calls and bad rules.

The Wireless Bridge: Throw the WET610N away. It is a piece of garbage. It is slow to connect, impossible to configure, and a horrible piece of hardware to use in a game where seconds count. Six minutes a match? You wait almost a minute for the darn thing to even connect. Solutions: www.ebay.com or www.amazon.com. Our WGA600N connects in about 6 seconds, every time, no matter what the order we plug stuff in.

The Safety Award: The mechanic is *useless*. The token system is ridiculous. You have UL safety judges, a whole gaggle of them. Make Safety Judging part of Robot Inspection.

[Billfred]

In no particular order:

The ranking system. When a Championship contender decides it's in its best interest from the seeding standpoint to take a 29-0 dive (no matter how spectacular it was to watch the scoreboard climb), what does that say?

Also, while the five-point win bonus made for a great improvement in the system after week 1, how will the GDC be able to calibrate that bonus in future years with wildly different scoring? Unless you throw those first-week events under the bus, it seems nearly impossible.

Make the coopertition score the first tiebreaker after WLT record, though, and I'm fine.

The control system. My position has been clear on the reuse of control system components (I'd rather not), but I'll grit my teeth and do it. All I ask is for this system to work reliably, especially on the field. I was partially relieved to hear of no new announcements in Atlanta for the control system--now please, beat the hell out of it with the FMS this off-season!

Bumpers. I miss them being optional. I miss them being colored as we desire, if applicable. I miss being able to style our numbers where and as we desire, within the bounds of the applicable rules. I would not miss seeing a dozen or so teams at Bayou just outside the venue painting their bumpers to get their numbers on (and, generally, getting less-than-stellar results in the process).

Assuming that FIRST finds the 2010-spec bumper rules desirable, though, how about this: Give us 12" in the middle of each bumper to style as we see fit, provided that it includes the 4" numbers and that the background isn't the other color (e.g. no blue backgrounds on the red bumpers). Doing so would allow much better opportunities to brand the robots with more familiar elements (sponsor logos, slogans, pigs on rockets) to aid recognition while doing little to diminish recognition of alliance color.

No game ball in the kit of parts. See above.

Dean's List timing. See every other post about it. Wonderful intent, awful announcement timing. We'll give it a go in 2011.

------------------------------------

Aside: I hope everyone posting in this thread will take the time to post in the Positives thread as well.

[pfreivald]

My primary suggestion for how things can be done better is the same every year: If something is illegal, and will garner a penalty, it should be penalized *every time*, consistently, and without even the tiniest regard to whether or not it will make the game 0-0...

From contact outside the bumper zone (which was almost never called during Overdrive, much to my chagrin given our robot design) to balls 3+" inside the frame perimeter (which was properly called week one, and then modified afterward for reasons I do not agree with), teams should have very clear expectations for how their robot should be designed so as to minimize penalties.

Defining situations that incur penalties and then not penalizing them (to the best of the refs' abilities, of course) just simply should not be done. If it's a penalty, then students should design their robots not to incur that penalty -- and if they don't, then they should learn a little something about game play and design constraints, just like every other aspect of the game.

[PaW]

Originally Posted by hill

Training for the camera operators for Championships. Watching the web casts was a pain because the field side camera men would zoom in on the drivers for 5-15 second periods during the match. They would do the same to individual robots during the match as well, so it was hard to have any idea of how the match was going besides watching the real-time scoring.
...

I suggest that a majority of each match be a zoomed out view of the entire field, while a smaller percentage of time is dedicated to zooming in on a particular robot or drive team.

+1

It's nice to see the kids run and grab the controls. But to focus on them for the next 10-15 seconds? If that's the primary target, what about the 5 other driver teams on the field?

And during the bonus period, how about 'zooming out' in order to see both alliances attempting to hang? I think I may have a caught a match or two where two robots were attempting to hang on the same tower, but the video feed concentrated on only one robot.

[thefro526]

I already posted in this thread, but I dislike the next subject so much that I'll make another post.

BUMPERS.

I've never really known a game in the Pre-Bumper Era except for triple play, and I feel that bumpers a good thing for FRC because they do lessen some impacts and the amount of damage taken by a robot due to defense. Any robot I build from this point forward will have bumpers whether they are mandatory or not.

BUT, I hated the mandatory bumper colors and marking restrictions this year. Also, I don't think that bumpers should be mandatory, or at least the rules should be relaxed so they aren't such a design restriction. I can understand what FIRST was trying to do with the red and blue bumpers this year, but many teams used bumpers in previous years to help in decorating their robot and to carry their team image through their machine.

Personally, I think that FIRST should find another way to differentiate one alliance from the other that isn't bumper colors. IMO, I'm a huge fan of the Giant Spinning light used in games pre-2005.

[Grim Tuesday]

Originally Posted by pfreivald

My primary suggestion for how things can be done better is the same every year: If something is illegal, and will garner a penalty, it should be penalized *every time*, consistently, and without even the tiniest regard to whether or not it will make the game 0-0...

From contact outside the bumper zone (which was almost never called during Overdrive, much to my chagrin given our robot design) to balls 3+" inside the frame perimeter (which was properly called week one, and then modified afterward for reasons I do not agree with), teams should have very clear expectations for how their robot should be designed so as to minimize penalties.

Defining situations that incur penalties and then not penalizing them (to the best of the refs' abilities, of course) just simply should not be done. If it's a penalty, then students should design their robots not to incur that penalty -- and if they don't, then they should learn a little something about game play and design constraints, just like every other aspect of the game.

I assume you are talking about G46. My team, as well was saddened to heard that it was abolished, as we had built our robot to specifically not get balls under it, by having tank treads. It gave us a competitive advantage that other teams didn't have when they rode over balls. In the entire FLR, we did not get a single ball penetration violation. However, if the same rule was in place at other regionals, then we may have seeded even higher than we did.

I do understand that it was the GDC's intent, though, and it made it a more fun game to watch, without the MC constantly yelling BALL PENETRATION VIOLATION, like they did at FLR

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

I assume you are talking about G46. My team, as well was saddened to heard that it was abolished, as we had built our robot to specifically not get balls under it, by having tank treads.

Our Overdrive robot extended outside our bumper zone a maximum of 4", and then only while acquiring the ball, so that we would not incur incidental contact penalties. Watching the games and counting actual incidental contact from various trackball manipulators, I think *every single match* would have been a 0-0 tie if they were calling it properly...

...which means that teams are so used to penalties not being called for certain rules that they don't even worry about them... So why have them?

[synth3tk]

I'm not going to take long here, so I'll just echo the points mentioned in this thread that I agree with:

Control System. It's awful. I'm grateful that teams have the chance to work with some pretty cool equipment, but the Classmate should be all but scrapped, the FMS clearly hates mixing routers, and don't get me started on the cRio reboot times.

Dean's List. While my team never had the resources to focus on award-writing, I feel that the teams who do were slighted greatly by what can only be summed up as bad timing.

Inspections. That protruding bolt head deal caused us a match and about a half-hour of work over a half-inch of length. The sad part is, nothing would have gotten entangled anyway, since the bumpers extended much farther than the 1/4" each bolt added.

CMP cameras. I loved the overhead boom shots that they had. That doesn't make up for missing a shot of two/three robots hanging on the same tower. And what are they focusing on during this time? The drivers, a robot that's failing at attempting to score a ball repeatedly, the crowd, the concrete floor, the bird on the ceiling....

There are 5 weeks of regionals before Championships. I know they're a professional TV crew with busy schedules, but PLEASE make sure they attend one or two regionals as spectators to get a sense of what's important for that year's game. It's hard to explain to my boss or family why the crowd is going beserk while we're watching a flipped robot for 20-seconds.

Bumpers. Ditto to everyone in the thread.

Sound system (Buckeye-specific). OK, we go from way too loud (as in pants were shaking) last year, to barely audible this year? Is this some kind of joke, or did they not know how low the levels were this year? The music, during dance breaks, was alright. But my main gripe was with the voices. The MC went so silent at times that you could hear a pin drop from the pits. The crowd didn't seem to be as into the competition as previous years (though that's not entirely a sound problem, louder music can help).

Teams in queue lines were definitely grateful for not having 5-foot speakers/woofers next to them this season, though. I approve of that.

[Jim Giacchi]

The control system as mentioned before, I am just echoing previous comments.

The old IFI controller, I brought it home as a sophomore in high school (2001), plugged it in, read the couple of pages of instructions that were available online and it worked without any problems. Programming involved one small program and one resource file.
Now I need multiple files, multiple programs, several DVD's worth of information, then after I install of of that (which takes an ungodly amount of time and restarts to do) I then had to update several different things, with several different files. It was frustrating to me as a mentor, to our kids it was just impossible. (The caveat here is that I'm the mechanical mentor, but our programmer who really knows his stuff had a horrible time with it as well.)
There was a whole lot of time wasted waiting to see if it would come back on, whether it was rebooting, resyncing the router, changing settings. Way to much wasted time troubleshooting a system that should be plug and play.

The Scoring System
I sat in the stands and tried to explain to parents how the loosing team received more points then the winning team, when asked why, I honestly couldn't explain that part to them. (This was both before and after the update) It never makes sense to me how the scoring system works, FIRST has tried this several times, in my opinion it just doesn't work. It is supposed to be a competition. Then add the fact that the scoring system changed after the first week, that doesn't make sense to me, especially since people pointed out the flaws in the scoring system almost immediately after it was posted in the rooms.

Safety Award
I agree completely and 100% with the award for being the most obnoxious / the meaningless safety tokens.

I just think that they are trying to make it more complicated year after year, when it should really stay the same. FIRST is great at inspiring young minds. I know that a whole bunch of kids on my team LOVE to work with this stuff. They would love it regardless of how crazy complicated the control system was, or how complicated the game is, or even whether they win or lose (because no matter how the scoring system works, the same number of teams still win and the same number still lose regardless of how the points are awarded)

[Koko Ed]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

The Safety Award should be awarded to the safest teams, not the most obnoxious. Just imagine if the GP award was given out the way the Safety award is...

I believe it would then be retitled the "Kill Them With Kindness" Award.

[JaneYoung]

Dark numbers on the bumpers - red and blue. Don't use dark colors. Couldn't see the dark numbers on the webcast.

I'm posting the red and blue bumpers and light colored numbers in the positive thread. They were AWEsome.

Ok, back to the negatives...

Jane

[Stephen Kowski]

#1 we did not pay thousands of dollars to be a field beta tester, have your field issues worked out BEFORE Week 1

#2 if you are going to have all these events, please make sure each one is staffed with competent referees, or at least ones that are wrong but consistent

[synth3tk]

Originally Posted by Stephen Kowski

#2 if you are going to have all these events, please make sure each one is staffed with competent referees, or at least ones that are wrong but consistent

It's hard to do that when FIRST themselves aren't even consistent....