Quickest 2 mins in first

[dlavery]

Originally Posted by nuggetsyl

I was talking to a few teams and this year the 2 mins just do not seem long enough. Maybe it is because of all the tasks there are this year but this game i think need to be played in 2:30 rounds.

And it is for that exact reason that the game shoudl be 2:00 long. If you had enough time to do everything there was to do, then there would be no strategic decisions to make. But the beauty of this game (and of life) is that you are forced to make trade-offs and decisions in real-time, without complete information, and with too many things going on at once. Those that learn how to do this best, and make the best choices in a suboptimal situation, will come out ahead (just like in life).

Originally Posted by KenLeung

On the other hand, it is going to take a long time to reset a match. Considering it takes 2 mins a match, 1 minutes of counting score, 1.5 mins of taking robot off the bar and clearing the field, 1.5 mins of reseting balls and setting up robots for next match, that is a 6 mins cycle already. Not to mention it won't be so smooth on the first day. 5 mins is the standard match cycle last year, 7 is what we used at off season when people weren't trained. I would be really worried to see 7 min match cycle through out the season.

At VCU, when the field handling team really got in the groove, the reset time was actually well under 5 minutes per round. We finished the competition 20 minutes ahead of schedule! One of the keys seemed to be having the field attendants start to reset the field and remove the non-scoring balls on the floor of the field while the judges were still counting the balls in the goals - this parallel activity really helped move things along (this hint will probably be passed on to the other regional events).

-dave

[ngreen]

Originally Posted by dlavery

you are forced to make trade-offs

Yes. One of the ten principles of economics. Tradeoffs happen because we have scarce resources. In this case it is time. You have to assess your oppurtunity cost and decide what will score you the most points in that time.

If they gave us more time to play the game would completely shift and everyone would try to do everything and it might grow to be chaotic and boring all in one.

[tkwetzel]

If they made it longer, you would expect to do a lot more. People would then complain that time was too short again...and it would keep going on this way until the matches become too long for a weekend competition with 40 teams.