paper: Spanking the Children

[EricH]

Originally Posted by ErvinI

Can't wait to hear this story .

I'll let Karthik fill in the gory details, but suffice it to say that the reffing was extremely inconsistent between fields at Championship. 1114 and 330 played on a field with very lenient reffing--you could tear someone's robot apart and probably get away with it (Again, ask Karthik--I think he's got a better memory on that one that I do). OTOH, on Einstein, a simple robot-robot high collision that was a result of two robots going to the same scoring space and just happened to tip one over resulted in a disable-DQ to the other alliance.

but the game was always compromised by a collection of penalty rules which seemed to have been written by people who had never built or driven a robot.

This particular item rather bugs me. I would REALLY like to know exactly how many current GDC members have EVER been ON an FRC team, in any capacity whatsoever. Some of their rulings in the past have been pretty lousy, to say the least. (My favorite question was dished out by FRC116 in 2011, I suspect by Mr. Lavery himself after he left the GDC, asking exactly what in the rules prohibited a certain activity, given that it had previously been allowed by Q&A and appeared to fit all the rules for the minibots. In the process, the author made the entire GDC look like a bunch of... well, I won't say exactly what. Wish I could find it; it's in an old Q&A system.) With all the "possession" questions they had early in the season this year, it still took two or three updates to clarify an item that could REALLY affect the game--and the fact that clarification was needed was shown by the sheer number of Q&As on the topic.