Drivers' Meeting

[David Brinza]

Originally Posted by sw293

"Robot strategies intended to disrupt the aim of an opposing robot are acceptable and to be expected as long as they are not excessive." Where in the rules has this changed? The refs are not banning all disruptive autonomous strategies despite the rules and the Q&A are they?

It seems to me that a robot that is stationary in its starting box is protected against a high speed smash. An acceptable disruptive autonomous strategy (as I think may have even been described in the meeting) would be for the disrupting robot to slow down just prior to contact with a stationary autonomous shooter. Programmers, sharpen up those lines of code!

[UlTiMaTeP]

Originally Posted by David Brinza

It seems to me that a robot that is stationary in its starting box is protected against a high speed smash. An acceptable disruptive autonomous strategy (as I think may have even been described in the meeting) would be for the disrupting robot to slow down just prior to contact with a stationary autonomous shooter. Programmers, sharpen up those lines of code!

I think you hit the nail on the head

[Mark Pierce]

Originally Posted by David Brinza

An acceptable disruptive autonomous strategy ... would be for the disrupting robot to slow down just prior to contact with a stationary autonomous shooter.

Nope. The earlier post is correct. It appears that essentially "all bets are off if the target has moved out of the starting box."

Almost nothing in my 8 years of FIRST has been so discouraging as to be tipped in autonomous two matches in a row. I've got mentors and parents asking how this is different than Battle bots. I sincerely wish that when the first questions were asked that FIRST had changed the rules to prohibit autonomous motion on the defensive side of the field. At least at the regional level, teams were afraid of a DQ or other penalty.

[Spikey]

Wow that rule for expanding bots is terrible! If any of you have seen SPIKE we expand with our net, and now people can just hit the net, and we get penalites, that is really dumb. Why start using this rule now? It was not in effect at the two regionals we attended.
Luckily we were able to constrain our expanding hopper, but this new rule/interepretation is ridiculous.

[ScoutingNerd175]

Originally Posted by Spikey

Wow that rule for expanding bots is terrible! If any of you have seen SPIKE we expand with our net, and now people can just hit the net, and we get penalites, that is really dumb. Why start using this rule now? It was not in effect at the two regionals we attended.
Luckily we were able to constrain our expanding hopper, but this new rule/interepretation is ridiculous.

Seeing Spike's robot with the smaller net was thoroughly depressing. At Chesapeake, everyone knew who Spike was. They had a great machine and I applaud them for playing hard. I am sorry that they had to change an excellent robot to conform with rules that had been enforced differently at previous competitions. I know that with the game changing every year and all the different people responsible for enforcing the rules, these sorts of things do happen. Thanks to the refs for all their hard work.

[TomBurr]

I, too, was thoroughly disgusted by the drivers meeting. However, I feel like I am against the majority. I was not offended by the rules, they are what they are, and there is little use to arguing with the referees over moot points. I was shocked by the complete lack of gracious professionalism by some of the drivers/stage crew. No respect was shown to the referees or FIRST.

Worst of all though, everyone applauded the repeated, unsportsman-like conduct. I've seen a lot better out of first.

Also, everyone needs to remember that you are representing your entire team, not just yourself.

[sw293]

Originally Posted by TomBurr

I, too, was thoroughly disgusted by the drivers meeting. However, I feel like I am against the majority. I was not offended by the rules, they are what they are, and there is little use to arguing with the referees over moot points. I was shocked by the complete lack of gracious professionalism by some of the drivers/stage crew. No respect was shown to the referees or FIRST.

Worst of all though, everyone applauded the repeated, unsportsman-like conduct. I've seen a lot better out of first.

Also, everyone needs to remember that you are representing your entire team, not just yourself.

I was not there, but I can understand people getting upset when they are forced to completely change their strategy on very short notice when FIRST could well have issued a "point of emphasis" in an update or the head ref. In any event, I try to avoid accusing others of lacking gracious professionalism. Here are a couple of spotlighted quotes that I find relevant (though I based on what I just said I can't really associate myself with the first one):

Originally Posted by boiler

It's not very graciously professional to point out the un-gracious professionalism in others.

Originally Posted by Rich Kressly

- Only think of Gracious Professionalism as a standard to work toward personally. - Never use it as a gauge to point out someone else’s shortcomings.

[anna~marie]

it was long and spiteful, full of people who need to learn to read... and it made me miss dinner with my team >_<
Seriously, the manual is out for a reason... um... to read it maybe?

[Ian Jones]

Originally Posted by anna~marie

it was long and spiteful, full of people who need to learn to read... and it made me miss dinner with my team >_<
Seriously, the manual is out for a reason... um... to read it maybe?

No one said you had to be/stay there.

I was the kid from team 461 asking lots of questions about incidental contact, I just wanted to know if our wheelie bars (to keep us from tipping) would be penalized for getting ran into/over. We never got a penalty the entire competion for anything, and I don't think anyone got penalized for the incidental contact situation, but someone else could probably shed more light on that situation.

Keep in mind, everything has to do with what the referees see, and it is probably a lot more complicated than you think it is.

[Allison K]

Our robot has no apendages, and it would have to break in a pretty interesting manner in order to have a psuedo apendage, so I wasn't paying extremely close attention to all of the questions regarding them, but it seemed to me that a lot of the confusion was in the wording. I think what the ref's meant is that any contact would be subject to a penalty, whether it's actually called is at the discretion of the ref's. Therefore, if Team A has an apendage and Team B keeps running into it, it would seem logical that Team A would not be penalized, even though it is possible according to the rules. I could be wrong, but that conclusion makes the most sense, and seems to be consistant with previous FIRST competitions.

[Heretic121]

all i say to the whole waiting until the clock changes it BAH TO YOU REFS!!! its really gonna be hard for all 300+ teams to change what they learned at other regionals just for this one event... i reall REALLY dislike this one descion but everything else went great
and am very happy Dr. Brown is taking over since benji is MIA... cant wait for tommorows now todays competition...

[sw293]

Also: did he address extension contact inside the bumper zone?

[StephLee]

One new thing they're doing is putting a minor delay (about 10 seconds, we were told) between autonomous mode and the regular game, when they'll check the score and verify which alliance won. They said this was to eliminate matches where an alliance gets an unfair advantage because of a scoring screw up, and I completely applaud this change. We very nearly lost a match at Chesapeake (one point difference) because of that.

[Andrew Blair]

Well, that can go down at least as the most entertaining driver's meeting I've attended though...

[Guy Chriqui]

yeah the q&a got real harsh especially when that one guy asked for replacement cameras
the questions on a whole i felt were already answered in the beginning and just dragged on for some reason
btw i was that team 4 member and the fact that you can remember my question word for word astounds me =.