Championship 2007 - Atlanta - What Needs To Be Improved

[Wiirage]

[quote=dangerousdave;617071]I was very disappointed in the few thousand people that got up and left the dome following the finals last match Saturday night. That was disrespectful of the teams that competed and had not yet received their trophy's and very disrespectful of the 37 teams competing for the Chairmans award. These people were making a lot of noise while they exited and could easily be heard in the stands during the ceremony. Perhaps First should have mentioned not to leave following the last match but most everyone should have known this.

well we kinda had to leave early. i really wanted to stay quite frankly but some ppl had to be somewhere on sunday so we didnt even get to go to the party

[KTorak]

It's a fact that nothing can be done about, people will leave before all the awards are given out. Most of the time, it's to catch a flight or some other reason related to having to leave to go home.

[Mr MOE]

I agree with many of the comments made so far. Here is my list, which may be a bit repetitive, but from a different perspective.

* FREE TUBES
It was disappointed that someone like Mike Wade from NASA Goddard, who works so hard to supply field and field manager for many events on the East Coast, was not able to get ANY of the tubes that FIRST was using during the Championship. I don't mind if extras were given away. However, they would definitely be put to good use if Mike W. had a full-field set of them. Have someone truck them over to the wrap party and distribute thre rest if there were extras.

* TIME FOR FINALS / AWARDS
Either FIRST should shorten the awards/finals or incorporate the actual running time in the program. For the past X years, this part of the Championship has taken longer than allotted in the schedule. Let's just modify the schedule to indicate their true length. Then teams can plan accordingly and, perhaps, will not need to leave before they are complete.

* ENGINEERING INSPIRATION / CHAIRMANS AWARD
Last year, MOE won the CMP Engineering Inspiration Award. Since FIRST considers is the second highest award they present, this award should come right before the Chairman's Award and be given the honor it deserves.

Having won the Chairman's Award, our team was more excited than concerned about teams leaving early. I can understand why some might leave if they had transportation issues and needed to go to the wrap party, which they may have paid for but, due to the length of the finals/awards, could not stay at for long before they had to leave.

With all the emotion at the time, I hardly noticed teams leaving, but considered the comments here, I wish that it would have been run more effectively. Confetti, fireworks, or some special effect would have been nice to demonstrate the importance of the award. I can understand why confetti balls would not be used, but there are also confetti "shooters" which are unobtrusive and just as fun.

The best part of Houston Championship a few years ago for me was the balloons falling all around at the end of the Chairman's Award presentation. That was a reason to stay!!

* GETTING DOWN TO THE FIELD
Due to seating, our team stayed in our Curie seats throughout the finals. When we learned we won the Chairman's Award, we thought we could use the stairs right in front of us to get down to the field. Unfortunately, they had been locked up, so we had to walk up to the concourse, through lots of people, and back down the main aisleway. This took a long time. I felt bad that we did not have more MOEboteers down on the field, but we could not get their easily. It would have been very easy to have someone open the stairs for us. We could have saved 5-10 minutes.

Alternatively, it was very nice to walk by many teams who gave high fives and congratulated us.

* FINAL VIDEO COLLAGE
I remember the video collage at Disney World in 2000, our rookie year. It was awesome and was followed by fireworks and laser lights. It had a profound affect on me and reinforced what was so special about FIRST and the event my team had just completed. It was a fitting close for the event. It's a shame for the people and hours it took to compile that video to not have it more prominently displayed before everyone took off for the wrap party. I only caught glimpses of it as I made my way down to the field.

* WRAP PARTY
Not enough drinks (one whole row was empty) and the sound from the main stage was too loud to have a decent conversation (might be my "old ears").

FIRST did some great planning and execution for much of this event. However, the issues above bring down their overall rating for me.

[Daniel Brim]

The Algorithm
Seriously, FIRST, this has got to go. A lot of people are complaining about it, and rightfully so. In no world should somebody in the top 10 in tube scoring in their division seed 66th (125). Putting a team at a purposeful disadvantage is borderline ridiculous.
This led to other issues as well. To be quite frank, the finals were boring. I miss the days of the 2005/2006 finals, where it was a clash of the titans. The most deserving team got the #1 seed, and then picked who they thought was second best. Now it's normally a random team at #1, who will either pick a begrudging team that deserved to be #1, or will pick several of the best teams, who will decline (Newton 2006, Curie 2007 are examples, although the former didn't have the algorithm of doom).

The opening ceremonies
Please, show them on Galileo and Newton. I missed the WFA because I was in the stands in Galileo keeping some seats for the team. It would also make for a much faster transition from opening ceremonies to the first match. Speaking of the WFA, I would like to see it moved to Saturday afternoon. It seems devalued to have it when so many people can't see it.

The schedule
I don't like the way that the championships is structured. Practice day seems a bit pointless. I think that Thursday morning should be used for calibration and open practice, and then Thursday afternoon should have the opening ceremonies and a set of matches until about 6 or so. It lets all of the teams in a growing championships get more matches in.

The awards/finals
I don't like how *all* of the awards are intermixed with the finals. If the opening ceremonies are on Thursday, it gives more time to judge technical awards and they can be given Friday afternoon.


That's all I can think of for now, I'll post again if I can think of more.

[LightWaves1636]

Originally Posted by Daniel Brim

The Algorithm
Seriously, FIRST, this has got to go. A lot of people are complaining about it, and rightfully so. In no world should somebody in the top 10 in tube scoring in their division seed 66th (125). Putting a team at a purposeful disadvantage is borderline ridiculous.
This led to other issues as well. To be quite frank, the finals were boring. I miss the days of the 2005/2006 finals, where it was a clash of the titans. The most deserving team got the #1 seed, and then picked who they thought was second best. Now it's normally a random team at #1, who will either pick a begrudging team that deserved to be #1, or will pick several of the best teams, who will decline (Newton 2006, Curie 2007 are examples, although the former didn't have the algorithm of doom).

YES!! Gah, so many good teams were in places they shouldn't have been and they lost those matches due to bad alliances. We were greatly suprised how low Robonauts were, but at least they got picked, I wasn't able to watch their matches though.

[jill399]

A lot of the things I'm going to say have been said before, but it's a way to let everyone know how important these few things are.

1- Algorithm. Really good teams that I have personally seen perform were seeded very low in Championships because of alliance partners. One or two bad matches are to be expected, but when good teams lose almost all of their matches through weak alliances, something has to be wrong.

2- Sound. I missed almost all of opening ceremonies because the sound on Newton was music and not the ceremonies. I couldn't hear anything Dean Kamen said, or any of the other presenters. By the time i walked from Newton to the back of Galileo, the national anthem was being sung and the ceremonies were over. It was my first time at championships and missing the ceremonies really irked me. Also, during the FVC awards, I couldn't hear anything the judges were saying. We were seated off to the right of the stage, closer to Newton, but not close enough that you would expect to only hear what's going on in the FRC match and nothing from the section you were sitting in.

3- Projection in pits. It usually took me 3 times to read the seeds in Newton because of the lack of quality. One time, after standing for 10 minutes, i gave up trying to find where my team was because i couldnt distinguish an 8 from a 9 or a 6 from a 3. Also, Newton and Curie had two different systems for showing the seeds. Newton showed two pages of scores that divided the 86 teams in half. This is good for teams that know where abouts theyre seeded but when you have 3 seconds a shot to find your team number out of 43, it tends to take a while. But, in Curie, they were showing the seeds one team at a time. Although this gave more time to find your team, it took forever to go back to a number that you may have missed.

4- Lack of gracious professionalism in the stands. I know some teams dont like to stand up and cheer, but for those that do [like mine] we try to sit in the back somewhat so that we dont get in the way of others. However, my team needed to get up and leave one time, and the team behind us started yelling at us to sit down and "what are you doing?!" "this is our match!! get out of the way!!" and when we started to apologize they kept on yelling. I can understand their mentality, but yelling at another team is not something FIRST teams should do. Especially when there are three rows of empty seats in front of us.

5- Saving seats. Before championships, word was that Curie was the powerhouse division this year. Therefore, three friends and I wanted to go watch a couple finals matches. However, in the only seats we could find [to the very very left of the field] there were at least 15 rows of seats saved for teams by 2 people each. When we tried to explain that we were just sitting there for the finals, and not to worry, our team isnt going to sit here for Einstein or anything like that, team mentors/advisors/parents (not sure which of those they were) continued to tell us to move, they were saving those seats. It states clearly in the rules that saving seats is illegal. I know that making sure your team sits together is important and it's hard to have everyone in the stands at all times, but when four students want to sit in one of 3 rows youre saving for a team and an adult yells at you to leave, there's something wrong. A FIRST volunteer sitting in the back of the stands saw us move from empty row to empty row looking for seats and being told theyre saved, and she told us to go ahead and sit wherever we wanted. Turns out, we were only there for 10 minutes to watch. And no one from the other teams had come to claim their seats yet.

6- Free tubes, leaving stands. Everyone has said pretty much everything to say about this topic.

7- Chaiman's Honorable Mentions. Our team was going for National Chairman's, and although we figured that we wouldn't win this year, we were waiting for the Honorable Mentions. That would let our team know how much we needed to improve our program. If we got the Honorable Mention, then we could scope out which of our programs are Chairman's worthy and which of them need a lot of improvement. I'm not saying we wouldnt do this otherwise, but getting a grasp of where we stand was something we were hoping for as soon as we won Chairman's in LA. We were one of the last teams in the stands because we were waiting for those Honorable Mentions. If FIRST decided it was in the better interest of its teams to nix them, they should have made an announcement somewhere to let teams know who were going for Chairman's. We were all disappointed when the ceremonies seemed to just be over without someone saying it was over and without the Honorable Mentions. Congratulations to MOE, and I wish more teams could have understood the importance of that award for you. I understand that some of them had flights to catch and places to go, but guaranteed that at least a few teams headed over to the Wrap Party.

8- Schedule of Events. For first-time Championship goers like myself, I was oblivious to what was going on, for the most part. I knew the series of events that happened in each divison- practice day, two 1/2 days of qualifiers, and finals- that I learned from regionals. But, outside of that, everything was quite confusing. I heard about a parade but no time, I didnt know how the Einstein finals went, what awards were given when, when the pits opened and closed etc. until the events were actually going on. A schedule of events posted at the entrance to the Dome and at the Pit Admin would have helped a lot of newcomers get a grasp of what was going to happen during those days in Atlanta instead of being rushed along.

I had an absolutely awesome time, but there is always room for improvement.

[Scott Carpman]

Originally Posted by jill399

7- Chaiman's Honorable Mentions. Our team was going for National Chairman's, and although we figured that we wouldn't win this year, we were waiting for the Honorable Mentions. That would let our team know how much we needed to improve our program. If we got the Honorable Mention, then we could scope out which of our programs are Chairman's worthy and which of them need a lot of improvement. I'm not saying we wouldnt do this otherwise, but getting a grasp of where we stand was something we were hoping for as soon as we won Chairman's in LA. We were one of the last teams in the stands because we were waiting for those Honorable Mentions. If FIRST decided it was in the better interest of its teams to nix them, they should have made an announcement somewhere to let teams know who were going for Chairman's. We were all disappointed when the ceremonies seemed to just be over without someone saying it was over and without the Honorable Mentions. Congratulations to MOE, and I wish more teams could have understood the importance of that award for you. I understand that some of them had flights to catch and places to go, but guaranteed that at least a few teams headed over to the Wrap Party.

Change LA to NYC and you just captured my feelings exactly.

[Nuttyman54]

-Opening Ceremonies: I understand that they want everyone on Einstein for opening ceremonies, but it would be nice if they could put them on the Newton and Archimedes screens so those of us that are watching the team laptops and jackets can see what's going on, instead of trying to listen to the terrible reverb

-Chairman's: I would prefer that there be more celebration. I understand the problems with confetti, but what about something like dropping balloons (I think they did this on 03), or at least some small pyrotechnics or something?

-Chairman's Honorable Mention: It's been said. We like to know where we stand compared to the winners (Congrats MOE 365)

-Match pairings: Random please. No more of this A B C categorizing. If the official manual specifies random partners, we expect random partners.

-Awards: Here's one I haven't seen yet. While the concept of showing video of each team's robots as they received the awards was nice, they picked probably the WORST video clips I could've imagined. Dropped tubes, showing other team's robots, it made people focus on something useless that was playing on the screen.

-Free Tube Announcement: Honestly, I missed this announcement, but I was wondering what the commotion was about. Agreed with the above, please wait until AFTER Chairman's

-DQ's: I believe this is an issue with the scoring software not being able to do this, but for the two red cards that were handed out, I would've liked to have seen the actual match scores. I don't believe either call actually made a difference, but I would've liked to have known who won each match, regardless.

[George A.]

From a Game Announcer standpoint (and I know there's a lot more of you then there are of us) I didn't like that the refs showed the number that corresponded with the amount of the lift, and even worse the score announcer announced it to the crowd (nothing against Don Knight, who's an amazing announcer, it just irked me). I understand the refs need to communicate, but they could just walk over and tell the other ref instead of broadcasting it.

I know from past experiences (3 regionals this year) that during elims the crowd is on the edge of their seat, and if you can build that suspense it really helps the excitement. The crowd can obviously tell who won on the rack just by looking at it, unless the ringers are really scattered that the quick math is almost impossible to tell. The thing they DON'T know, is whether the robots got the 15, or 30 point bonus, which in many cases decides the match.

So by announcing what the bonus was, it totally defeats the purpose of the score slide. Granted you may not know the exact numbers...but you could pretty much figure it out. I think they should've kept it a secret until the slide is projected.

Sorry about the rant, it's just my 2% of a dollar.

[jgannon]

Originally Posted by Nuttyman54

I believe this is an issue with the scoring software not being able to do this, but for the two red cards that were handed out, I would've liked to have seen the actual match scores. I don't believe either call actually made a difference, but I would've liked to have known who won each match, regardless.

I was one of two people running the scoring and field control system on Newton. This is not a limitation of the scoring system, and in fact it's kind of a pain to zero out an alliance's score... just DQing all three teams doesn't do it. I would have liked to post the hypothetical score in the Newton elims, but the head ref demanded that the scoring screen say 0 before it was posted. I understand this reasoning... no sense in causing a bunch of "what ifs" for the teams involved. Sorry it took us so darn long to figure out how to do it.

[Paul Copioli]

For those of you that had seen my earlier public complaints of FIRST, in general, rest assured the battle is still being fought; but in private. This post will not go over any of the items that I consider general FIRST improvements, but rather Championship specific improvements (except for item 1).


1. Get rid of the algorithm of Doom. For no other reason but what is published in section 9.3.2 in the manual:

9.3.2 Match Assignment
The scoring system will randomly assign each team two ALLIANCE partners for each qualifying match played. All teams will play the same number of qualifying matches except if the number of teams in attendance is not divisible by six; in that case the scoring system will randomly select some teams to play an extra match. For purposes of seeding calculations, those teams will be designated as SURROGATES for the extra match.

Say what you do and do what you say. On that note; before team 217 pays our registration fee for 2008, we will insist that we have reassurance from FIRST, in writing, that the match algorithm is random at all events. It was sad that a first year student on my team could predict the 1st 14 matches on Galileo one week before the event.

2. Please reduce practice day. One round of practices to make sure the field works properly and each team gets the opportunity to practice once. Also have a "first come - first serve" line that fills the missing teams in practice matches. Start opening ceremonies and qualifying matches on thursday after lunch. Get 2 or 3 rounds of matches in on Thursday. Maybe even do FVC and FRC opening ceremonies at the same time on Thursday. The biggest obstacle to this is inspections. If teams know in advance that they will have matches on Thursday, I bet the majority of teams will give up the extra time to get extra matches. The cost for the Championship is almost $1,000 per match ... ouch!

3. Let operators (with badges) use the stairs going from the field to the floor. Only two people are really required to move the robot from the pits to the dome. The other two can stay out of the way by staying in the stands until the time they need to go to the match. I just want an explanation of "why not" that makes sense (not becasue FIRST said so).

4. Publish the correct time for the awards ceremony ending. It has finished at the same time for the last few years. The Chairman's award sure didn't seem like it was the highest award with its cut down time and anticlimatic ending. Moe deserved more than that as they are a great team and deserve better.

For those of you who said teams had to get to places, please explain to me why the after party had well over 2,000 people at it when we arrrived. My wife and I left right after the announcement was made regarding Chairmans and basically ran to the after party (I had an all access badge so we could get there pretty fast via the short cuts). The party was pretty packed at that time. For reference, the VIP area had 0 people at it when we walked by because they were at the awards ceremonies and stayed until the end.

[Steve Wherry]

The only way to avoid teams leaving early during the awards is to somehow redo the schedule so that the awards end earlier. Pushing flights later into the evening becomes a travel headache. It is also difficult to begin matches on Thursday because tech-inspection takes a full day for 340 robots.

Some suggestions that would affect the competition very little:

• Start Opening ceremonies 30-minutes early and run Friday matches 30-minutes longer. This saves an hour to help end awards earlier on Saturday.
• During the semi's and final championship matches, put the teams and awards on a specific schedule. Run two semifinal matches, then 15-minutes of awards; then two more matches, then 15-minutes of awards. This can similarly be done for the final matches. The teams then know exactly when they must be ready. There was much dead-time waiting for the teams to return to the field after awards had been announced.
• Do not run back-to-back practice matches and then reduce the number of practice matches. Running two consecutive practice matches is no good to a team that is not functioning well. Opening ceremonies could then possibly be on Thursday evening. This would help Friday morning matches to start on time (although matches ran ahead of schedule this year) and the opening ceremonies would not need to be rushed.

Just some thoughts after experiencing 8 championships.

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by jill399

5- Saving seats. Before championships, word was that Curie was the powerhouse division this year. Therefore, three friends and I wanted to go watch a couple finals matches. However, in the only seats we could find [to the very very left of the field] there were at least 15 rows of seats saved for teams by 2 people each. When we tried to explain that we were just sitting there for the finals, and not to worry, our team isnt going to sit here for Einstein or anything like that, team mentors/advisors/parents (not sure which of those they were) continued to tell us to move, they were saving those seats. It states clearly in the rules that saving seats is illegal. I know that making sure your team sits together is important and it's hard to have everyone in the stands at all times, but when four students want to sit in one of 3 rows youre saving for a team and an adult yells at you to leave, there's something wrong. A FIRST volunteer sitting in the back of the stands saw us move from empty row to empty row looking for seats and being told theyre saved, and she told us to go ahead and sit wherever we wanted. Turns out, we were only there for 10 minutes to watch. And no one from the other teams had come to claim their seats yet.

Hands down this is my NUMBER ONE complaint. There were displays of rudeness everywhere of this problem. I think part of the problem may be because people affiliated with a team, like parents, are not familiar with the rules and tend to hoard seats when they shouldn't.

Our team is small and didn't use many seats and generally only when we were competing. Once we sat down to the protest of a parent holding 50 seats. Later we tried to sit about 5 people down for one match under the protest of an EXTREMELY boorish and rude middle aged man wearing a bright orange shirt that was holding seats for a whole team that never showed up anytime we were around. (Newton)

I post this with great hesitation but at some point I think it excessive displays of rudeness requires recognition.

If we can't get this problem fixed then maybe we need to go to assigned seating based on a lottery for a fixed number of seats per team. If we can't start being nice to one another this is where is could wind up.

Everyone, PLEASE, PLEASE, work on developing a plan and communicating it to everyone traveling with a team, including friends and family.

[KathieK]

Originally Posted by jill399

2- Sound....Also, during the FVC awards, I couldn't hear anything the judges were saying. We were seated off to the right of the stage, closer to Newton, but not close enough that you would expect to only hear what's going on in the FRC match and nothing from the section you were sitting in.

As the Vol. Coordinator on FVC at Champs last year I could not hear the speeches during the awards ceremony, nor who won the awards, and I was on the field. I complained to FIRST about this last year; I was hoping something would be done this year to correct the situation and it wasn't. FVC award winners deserve better than this.

[shawger]

Originally Posted by Daniel Brim

The Algorithm
Seriously, FIRST, this has got to go. A lot of people are complaining about it, and rightfully so. In no world should somebody in the top 10 in tube scoring in their division seed 66th (125). Putting a team at a purposeful disadvantage is borderline ridiculous.
This led to other issues as well. To be quite frank, the finals were boring. I miss the days of the 2005/2006 finals, where it was a clash of the titans. The most deserving team got the #1 seed, and then picked who they thought was second best. Now it's normally a random team at #1, who will either pick a begrudging team that deserved to be #1, or will pick several of the best teams, who will decline (Newton 2006, Curie 2007 are examples, although the former didn't have the algorithm of doom).

I like to think of the sorting algorithms and ranking systems as part of the challenge of the game. Yes, it's entirely possible that a poor performing robot gets lifted up because of their match schedule just as it's entirely possible that a well performing robot will get torn down. I think every team who's been around for a couple years has been on both sides of the fence.

If you are a truly amazing team who is ranked poorly, more often than not people will notice that. If they don't notice it, you can help them by passing out fact sheets to the highly ranked teams. My team did a considerable amount of scouting at the Championship and I can assure you we looked foremost at the robots ability.

You talked about 1114 and 330 rejecting us (1732) in the Curie division. When we picked them we knew full well that they were both going to reject us because they had told us that before the alliance selection. Since we (of course) wanted to win, we decided to make sure those two got split up. Again, it's just part of the strategy of the game.

If FIRST came up with a way of ranking teams from highest to lowest ability in perfect order I think the game would lose an entire dimension of strategy.