2012 Lessons Learned:The Negative

[stuart2054]

Originally Posted by Debbie

Definitely get rid of the Field Management problems. We lost our first elimination match by only 2 points but had one dead robot. The next alliance had a dead robot (1717) in the exact same location in the following match.

Also, eliminate anything that allows one team to easily manipulate the ranking of another team. Though to some degree you can always do this, this year it was too easy to keep a team down in ranking by refusing to co-op with them. Though we would think Gracious Professionalism would prohibit this from happening, it did.

District trophies were just sad. I understand making them smaller than regional, but the selected trophies were not a good choice.

MSC and MAR teams qualify in week 7 for worlds, not leaving them many choices with STEELE Meetings and freezing them out of events like the ball game and Finale. Something needs to be done to ensure these teams have equal chances to participate in all championship activities.

100 teams is TOO many in a division. You never get to know the teams in your division. Break it down into more divisions of smaller numbers. Allow us more matches to allow for better ranking chances.

Give division trophies as well as Championship trophies. Those getting the championship one could be eliminated from receiving division ones so that more than 10 or so teams out of 400 get recognized at the world level. It would recognize the top 5 teams at worlds (4 division winners, 1 championship winner).

Just a few thoughts.

I agree with Debbies assessment and have a few other suggestions.

1. The fields were too close to the spectator seating. You could not see the closest alliance bridge well from most of the seats. Moving them away 20-40 feet would help a lot.

2. I would like to see a move to more competition based entrance into the championship. I have no problem rookie all stars and HOF teams being there but it when there are 50% or more teams in all the divisions that have very limited robots and teams lack experience with the game it makes seeding matches a very "Luck of the draw" thing. Although there are many more very good teams in a championship division than a district or regional event the less experienced teams brought the seeding matches down to district event type play in my opinion. It didn't look like a championship to me until after alliance selection.

3. There should be a team entrance on the side of the dome where the trailers and parking was. I am not sure about others but our team likes to tailgate at these events and it is a pain to walk all around the dome to get back in.


Just some of my opinions.

[jblay]

Originally Posted by Debbie

100 teams is TOO many in a division. You never get to know the teams in your division. Break it down into more divisions of smaller numbers. Allow us more matches to allow for better ranking chances.

Either do this or get rid of signup for championship and make it pure qualification to decrease the number of teams in each division if FIRST doesn't have the space or people for more fields. I personally think that the ability for any team to signup for championship and not earn their way in takes away from the quality of play at championship.

Originally Posted by twetherbee

I would have liked to have seen a separate practice bridge in the pits. With as much as the triple balance was worth and how specifically the combinations of robots had to fit together, it was very unfortunate that it was so complicated to get combinations of robots together to try it. Seems like they could have replaced the extra hoop off to the side with a bridge practice area (like so many regionals, including ours in Vegas, had) and let more teams onto the main field for hoop practice.

This was ridiculous. For a team like ours who was long and had a stinger, we knew we could triple with another long robot, but no team would spend their practice spot to learn if we were a viable 2nd round pick because it made more sense for them to learn if they could triple with one of the elite long robots. I don't blame the teams for this at all because I would do the same exact thing, you only have so many slots and to spend it on us isn't worth it.

[Rob Stehlik]

Please bring back the live feed to the pits!

[Jon Stratis]

My negatives:
1. The bumper issues this year were horrible. Through all the weeks of regionals/districts, about half the teams at each event had bumper issues that needed to be fixed. That number is way to high to blame it all on the teams.
2. There was very little defense played at the regional level this year - for the most part, teams stayed on their half of the court and did their own thing. There were exceptions, but it made the game a little boring.
3. The game was a little more challenging than in past years, which I feel hurt the rookies. In the past, a kitbot could go in and do some good for a team, even if it's just driving to the other side and getting in the oppositions way. Not so with this year, as traversal of the field was non-trivial (despite how easy some teams made it appear!).
4. The Kinect has a great potential "coolness" factor that wasn't realized with this game. You didn't have long enough or accurate enough control to make it really useful during autonomous, and only letting one team on each alliance also limited its usefulness. This was something I really wanted to use this year, until I figured out we could do everything we wanted with a normal autonomous mode.

Some fixes for the above negatives:
1. FIRST has already stated they're getting a group together to go over the bumper rules for next year, and that group includes mentors and inspectors, the two groups of people that mater the most for this issue!
2. I'm not sure there's anything FIRST can do about this, other than to make sure we have a more balanced game next year!
3. I really feel that there needs to be something simple a team can do to materially benefit their alliance. I've been here for 6 years now, and tell tell you exactly what kitbots could do in every game up until now: Rack 'n Roll, they could play defense with little or no risk of penalties. Overdrive, they could do laps to score points. Lunacy, a good driver could avoid getting scored on. Breakaway, they could play defense fairly well just by getting in front of the goal. Logomotion, they could play defense really well just by pushing tubes to the sides and getting in the way. The game next year needs to include something for a simple kitbot to do!
4. The game needs to involve some way for the kinect to very clearly be superior. For example, in overdrive the balls were randomly positioned, and the hybrid remotes could, in theory, tell your robot where the ball actually was. The kinect gives us more control, so maybe take this same concept and make it 3 dimensional? What about allowing control of the robot through the kinect during teleop? There could be a portion of the field that isn't viewable from the driver station, but is from the kinect station - the human player can "take over" with the kinect in order to do something for some serious bonus points for their alliance.

[Grim Tuesday]

Originally Posted by Jon Stratis

My negatives:

3. I really feel that there needs to be something simple a team can do to materially benefit their alliance. I've been here for 6 years now, and tell tell you exactly what kitbots could do in every game up until now: Rack 'n Roll, they could play defense with little or no risk of penalties. Overdrive, they could do laps to score points. Lunacy, a good driver could avoid getting scored on. Breakaway, they could play defense fairly well just by getting in front of the goal. Logomotion, they could play defense really well just by pushing tubes to the sides and getting in the way. The game next year needs to include something for a simple kitbot to do!

If you build a small bot like 4334, (Archimedes champs) or 522 (NY Regional winner) you could be quite successful this year. A simple kitbot (on steroids) could balance on the bridges by following another team up, play "pushy pushy" defense or with a good driver, play "ball control defense". There was lots for a kitbot to do this year.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Grim Tuesday

If you build a small bot like 4334, (Archimedes champs) or 525 (NY Regional winner) you could be quite successful this year. A simple kitbot (on steroids) could balance on the bridges by following another team up, play "pushy pushy" defense or with a good driver, play "ball control defense". There was lots for a kitbot to do this year.

Agreed, this year there was really not much different a kitbot could do than in past years. In fact, because of balancing, it could be argued that a basic bot with no shooting or bridge mechanism would have more success than a basic bot last year that had no hanging or minibot deployment.

Also, it was 522 who won the NYC Regional/

[BrendanB]

I hope next year more field testing occurs before week 1 regionals. Our home regional of the Granite State Regional is week 1 and we were burned by balls stuck under the bridges and missed a lot of balances week 1 because we couldn't get the bridge down. Week 2 the panel was flipped and when we competed week 5 we had zero issues with balls under bridges. I thought the issue would have been fixed after our scrimmage that FIRST hosted but alas it was not. Not the end of the world but I don't know why they weren't steeper to begin with.

2. I agree with what people have said about the practice field at CMP. Even though I didn't attend this year it has been an issue in the past. 2011 especially with teams either testing auto, minibot, or scoring which was ineffective with a variety of testing on a field. I think it should be organized as follows: 2 full fields for wireless testing only. 2-4 large carpeted areas with several hoops and a lot of bridges. Maybe they could put these in two of the corners/along the back walls so it is out of the way. This would maximize practice as teams who want to run their robot to get more driver practice go to the field, teams who want to tune auto/their shooter and test balancing go to the carpeted areas.

3. Q&A needs to be much faster.

4. A little more clarification on bumpers rules and we are golden. "Exterior vertices" and the bumper numbers were vague to some teams.

5. Real time penalties is great, but having the emcee announce them after the match would be nice. I'm sure many team who didn't fully comprehend the rules didn't know they were committing them. It is nice that the match cycle is faster and specified unarguable rules are in place for silly items but if a team doesn't know they are committing something how will they get better?

As for the ball consistency this year, I know it sucks to have an inconsistency among balls, but when a company is mass producing a foam play ball they will vary and there is nothing we can do about it. Unless we want to pay double because they have to be tested. While annoying we took this into consideration with our robot so brand new or used, it still suck in from the key.

Overall, great season!

[Solidstate89]

Originally Posted by BrendanB

As for the ball consistency this year, I know it sucks to have an inconsistency among balls, but when a company is mass producing a foam play ball they will vary and there is nothing we can do about it. Unless we want to pay double because they have to be tested. While annoying we took this into consideration with our robot so brand new or used, it still suck in from the key.

Our loader mechanism admittedly had some issues here and there with the new balls (something we just decided we had to deal with) compared to those that were used, but my problem (and also one raised by a couple others) is the fact that the balls they used in the Championships vs. at least the two regionals we attended were completely different. They weren't just new, they were a different batch entirely.

[BrendanB]

Originally Posted by Solidstate89

Our loader mechanism admittedly had some issues here and there with the new balls (something we just decided we had to deal with) compared to those that were used, but my problem (and also one raised by a couple others) is the fact that the balls they used in the Championships vs. at least the two regionals we attended were completely different. They weren't just new, they were a different batch entirely.

Either you could have played with used regional balls (believe me in week 5 they didn't have too much life left in them) or new balls? I think the choice is pretty clear with the championship event playing 150 matches on 4 fields.

Having worked in retail, manufacturers don't make a product constantly (unless it is an extremely popular item such as food or major electronics) manufacturers make items in batches of xxxx (say 2000 cases) so distributors can sell them to stores/retail chains to sell over time before a new batch is made. Right now we are placing an order for camping coolers for the summer and won't be able to get them again until next year. Something similar happened in 2009 when FIRST ordered the last of the manufacturers batch to cover what they needed but another batch wasn't going to be made for a while. FIRST probably had to make several large purchases over time which was divided up among regional fields, Andymark, and the KOP.

I agree with everyone that it would have been nice to have the exact same ball but it just isn't possible with how economics work.

/endbunnytrail

[efoote868]

Make sure people can see the field regardless of where they are in the stands.
On Galileo, this meant pushing the field away from the stands by about 10-15 feet. When people in front stood up, the field was covered. When they sat down, only the co-op bridge and beyond could be seen.

Open up the upper levels and have more seating available throughout the ENTIRE competition.

Allow more entrances to the Edward Jones Dome. Put them on opposite ends of the building.


Please explain intent in the rule books, especially on chains of rules. Just like you don't like us lawyering your rules, we don't like reading your minds only to find that we got it wrong.

[Ross3098]

Originally Posted by Solidstate89

Our loader mechanism admittedly had some issues here and there with the new balls (something we just decided we had to deal with) compared to those that were used, but my problem (and also one raised by a couple others) is the fact that the balls they used in the Championships vs. at least the two regionals we attended were completely different. They weren't just new, they were a different batch entirely.

Same situation for our robot. Not a SINGLE problem with picking up balls through 2 districts and MSC. The balls introduced on Saturday before/during division elims were unbearable. Our intake jammed almost every time we tried to pick one of those up.

The new balls introduced were way different. After our last qualification match on Saturday we left the ball that jammed us in the robot. Normal balls we had used all season allowed ~1-2 inches of compression from squeezing. The ball that jammed us... 1/4 inch if we were trying...

I wish FIRST would have chosen a game piece that they have readily available for the entire season (Each object has the same consistency when new.) and will not change teams' ability to play the game as the season progresses.

[rsisk]

I missed the Web Hug