Team Update 2-19 and FRC Blog - Week 0 Observations and Stop Build Day

[dtengineering]

Rather than changing a rule, perhaps it would have been sufficient to add a rule:

"Any discs thrown by a human player that are seen to leave the playing field will result in a 10 point penalty to the offending alliance."


Human players would learn very, very quickly to keep their discs within bounds. Teams could still safely throw discs downfield to floor loaders, and could even aim for the low goals.

Actually, to ease reffing, it could probably be extended to a penalty for any disc leaving the field, whether fired by a robot or thrown by a human. It would be consistant with the guidance that discs are to remain within the bounds of the playing field.

And I'll cut the GDC some slack on this one... they probably tried throwing discs downfield to hit the goals as part of their game testing. They probably didn't do it, however, with the "enthusiasm" of a half-dozen excited teenagers with nothing to lose. I'll even grant them the fact that after observing a potentially dangerous situation that they were obliged to act to limit the danger. I just don't know if they chose the least disruptive way to go about it.

Jason

[cgmv123]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

Rather than changing a rule, perhaps it would have been sufficient to add a rule:

"Any discs thrown by a human player that are seen to leave the playing field will result in a 10 point penalty to the offending alliance."

I'd prefer a cap on the number of white discs that can be thrown. That doesn't get at the whole problem, but it's better than before..

[PVCpirate]

Thinking back to 2010: at least they didn't make the change after week 1.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by PVCpirate

Thinking back to 2010: at least they didn't make the change after week 1.

You're the second or third person to say this, and I have to disagree. For teams that chose to forego climbing for floor pickup, 1 week or 3 weeks makes no difference. You aren't going to be redesigning your bot to suddenly make it climb to thirty.

[Karthik]

My general principle is that there should be no significant rules changes after kickoff unless there's a safety issue involved. That's the case here. The GDC was in a very difficult position, having to choose between two unpleasant options; making a significant in-season rule change or leaving a significant safety hazard in play. In my opinion they absolutely made the right choice. Unfortunately, I know that right now this is very little consolation to the affected teams, especially because some of them made their strategic decisions based predicting this storm of frisbees that wasn't envisioned by the GDC.

As for how this will impact game play, there's no denying that this will change the game dynamic, I don't think the change is as large as people are making it out to be. The main value of a floor pickup is extra points that can be scored in the autonomous period; this hasn't been altered. Yes, there will be less discs available in the last 30 seconds of the match, but many of these discs would have been very difficult or even impossible to pick up by most teams. (Flipped over, clumped in piles, etc.) In general there won't be a shortage of discs; In 2012 Teams only made 66% of their shots on the Archimedes division at championship. I expect shooting percentages to be in that ballpark once again, leaving a huge supply of discs on the floor.

The group of people who I feel the worst for right now are the students who have been training and practicing for the past six weeks to be human players. There are definitely going to be some disappointed HPs tonight.

[Nick Lawrence]

Colour me unimpressed. I feel bad for the teams who built floor loading mechanisms. How could they not have seen this?

They should have enclosed the field more. End of story.

I hope this is fixed very very soon. If not, I know exactly what kind of robot will win a world championship this year.

-Nick

[JHammond]

Would not be surprised if the GDC did not anticipate human players throwing discs at a vertical orientation high and hard so that some carried 10+ feet over the field ends or spun out far beyond the corner of a field. In practice these flew very differently than a traditional horizontal Frisbee throw. They were more like missiles than anything at the Nashua event. You'd get 5 or 6 of these high hard throws in the air and it was a bit dicey.

[Djur]

Originally Posted by JHammond

Would not be surprised if the GDC did not anticipate human players throwing discs at a vertical orientation high and hard so that some carried 10+ feet over the field ends or spun out far beyond the corner of a field. In practice these flew very differently than a traditional horizontal Frisbee throw. They were more like missiles than anything at the Nashua event. You'd get 5 or 6 of these high hard throws in the air and it was a bit dicey.

Seconded. Our human players had to be careful not to get brained by frisbees.

[rcmolloy]

Originally Posted by Nick Lawrence

Colour me unimpressed. I feel bad for the teams who built floor loading mechanisms. How could they not have seen this?

They should have enclosed the field more. End of story.

I hope this is fixed very very soon. If not, I know exactly what kind of robot will win a world championship this year.

-Nick

I bet 469's strategic team bought the celebratory champagne (sparkling cider for others) right after the announcement.

On another note, this shouldn't kill gameplay at all. If you have a floor pickup mechanism, you have a much better chance of seeding higher than most of the teams at your competition if utilized well not only during autonomous but teleop as well. Having that one extra component of your robot that can do something most others cannot is just a plus in my opinion.

Trust me, I'm not even upset at this at all. That's a little surprising for me though since I have been trying to figure out the floor pickup problem with my kids for about 4 to 5 weeks. If you're looking to get ahead in the game before everyone else you will most definitely have some way of getting frisbees off the ground and into your robot.

[Blackphantom91]

Originally Posted by Nick Lawrence

Colour me unimpressed. I feel bad for the teams who built floor loading mechanisms. How could they not have seen this?

They should have enclosed the field more. End of story.

I hope this is fixed very very soon. If not, I know exactly what kind of robot will win a world championship this year.

-Nick

Care to clue us in on what robot?

On a side note I think it was a bad move to do something this drastic so late. It is unfortunate that many teams put their hard time and effort into design for the rules of the game to change. Many people have spent long weeks designing these soon to be spectacular robots. although, at the end of the day what is done is done. I guess it may lead more into people investigating the 30lbs withholding I personally don't like it but I can't gripe there must have been an logistical reason behind it.

[connor.worley]

If the San Diego week 0 event showed me anything, there will still be no shortage of disks on the floor.

[Steven Donow]

Originally Posted by Nick Lawrence

Colour me unimpressed. I feel bad for the teams who built floor loading mechanisms. How could they not have seen this?

They should have enclosed the field more. End of story.

I hope this is fixed very very soon. If not, I know exactly what kind of robot will win a world championship this year.

-Nick

I don't know about other teams, but when deciding to do floor loading, "endgame flood" was just an additional benefit and not a major drive behind the design decision to floor load. No matter what, I think the floor will be fairly crowded due to missed shots. Maybe sometime tomorrow I'll do some math, but as of now, I'm just plain tired from build season. Also, while watching the stream of Suffield Shakedown, I think I saw plenty of discs upside down from HP throws, a contrast to most shot discs landing right side up.

And, looking at a video posted from Suffield Shakedown, I think this is definitely a good decision on the GDC's part, to at least in some way limit how much can be thrown in the last 30 seconds. There is most definitely a safety risk involved, and arguably can be seen as a distraction to the audience...

Now, when a thrown disc knocks down the alliance's own robot from climbing...that'll be something...

[SM987]

Originally Posted by waialua359

This just about sums it up.

At the highest level at competitions.....i.e. playoffs, regional finals, Einstein, etc. it will make a big difference.

I agree Glenn, it definitely could.

Originally Posted by Donut

I think this could have a drastic effect in low level qualification matches. Say you are a floor loader and are partnered with two robots with broken/inoperable/nonexistent shooters...

I think many teams can relate here. You get the same dice roll stop build day changes or otherwise. I can recall a few matches won last year by a human player score, or where the scoring consisted of human player shots entirely. So it certainly could impact "lower level" competition.

Individually, many of us are bummed because it feels like our robot has lost some competitive value. Whether an alliance we are on is less valuable as a result... Guess we have to wait and see.

[Bill_B]

At the outset, the GDC must have done some thinking about how the last 30 seconds would be played. The total number of disks in the game was decided at some point based on factors like expected scoring rate, percentage success and how many could be fit through those slots. It seems likely, however, that week 0 performances and machinery is quite a bit below the expected level of play for the game. If the GDC was expecting some number of disks to have already been scored (and out of play) at the 30 second mark, the remaining numbers of disks in a week 0 game probably far exceeded that number.

Then there is the time allotted for HP activity. I wonder if the GDC even considered reducing it to 20 or 15 seconds or even 10. Maybe that's too great a change to the match management software to have been considered. We should be used to the GDC offering only partial explanations for their decisions by now.

Teams do not bring their completed machines to week 0, in general. I heard several explanations about the robots being the practice machine or not carrying all mechanisms. Floor pickup devices were among those listed as missing or under development. It was obvious that even in the elimination matches, the teams had intermediate goals for their play that were only experimental or developmental. For example, if a shooter had been out of adjustment, the team would explore alternate tactics that did not involve shooting.

[Wayne Doenges]

FRC Team isn't to concerned about the rule change. We can floor harvest or human load. We can pick up frisbees right side up or inverted. No Problem.