What did you think FIRST did particularly well this year?
FIRST did very well at making a game that people unfamiliar with FIRST can watch and track without much help.
They also did very well with the automated scoring system! I was first very iffy about using an automated scoring system this year because of the disasters that happened with using one in 2006. It looks like they made a game and successfully implemented this system without many problems.
They also did a nice job making the game more team based - you needed to choose alliance partners who bots would complement your own (although this also hurt some teams in the qualifiers who had strong bots but were more specialized and needed a certain type to work with them (like 910 was strong in the close, but needs a good mid-range bot to feed them balls).
I really liked the bumper colors. It has to be one of the beast and easiest ways I have seen to easily tell which bot is on which alliance. Last year was horrible for that, a bot with blue bumpers pulling a red trailer??? Ya it is a little painful to change them sometimes, but I think after another year or 2 teams can get really fast and have some really unique bumper designs.
An easy to watch/explain game, and an easy way to recognize alliances (bumpers) were good things for this year.
Almost everything related to the game.
The robot rules this year were almost completely unambiguous. Very easy to understand.
Materials utilization took another step in the right direction (several pneumatics restrictions were relaxed).
The Dean’s List Award is a great addition.
Thursday matches at CMP are a huge home run.
Live camera feed
Very helpful debugging tools built into control system (NetConsole, status displays on DS, Dashboard if you could implement it)
++ A game that is simple to play yet complex to design for.
++ A way to implement multiple autonomous routines just by clicking switching on the DS classmate rather than having to tediously wire switches up (left time for electronics team to do cooler things)
++ FIRST’s response to the snow and to the seeding system gripes
++ Dean’s list recipients
++ For more matches played across the board at most, if not all, regionals.
KISS
Very simple game, but with a multitude of solutions. The way it should be.
Bag and Tag outside Michigan worked nicely based on our experiences at KC and OKC.
This year’s game was by far my favorite yet.
It required a lot more strategy from the start of the year to the very end.
Plus I really liked how this year was modeled off a sport it made it fun to watch but still challenging to the teams.
I agree. This year’s game was more focused on the whole “coopertition” aspect of playing on alliances. This provides a little more variation and innovation amongst robots, and even made very effective strategies (take 469’s robot for example). I hope to see more of this in the future.
I liked the weekly update even when there were no updates so you could rest assured everything was the same for next week.
I agree that B&T outside Michigan (based on my experience with it at WAT and GTR) worked famously BUT. I think traditional shipping should be an option for teams coming from farther away than X. I don’t know what X is, but B&T is just not realistic for a NJ team competing in CA (25), or for an HI team competing in AZ (359). B&T for local teams, and visiting teams from other regions are allowed to ship.
I’d definitely agree with that. If we’d been far enough that driving was not practical, B&T would have been a problem.
The game this year was phenomenal. I didn’t like it at first, but Breakaway definitely grew on me. The combination of soccer balls flying across the field, fantastic defense, and last second elevation attempts made it exciting for almost everyone involved.
10 Qualification Matches at the Championship was HUGE. I applaud FIRST for making this change, and I hope they improve upon it in the Future.
The overall increase in Qualification Matches from 2009 was great. It’s nice to know that we’re getting a few more matches for our entrance fee.
More lax pneumatic rules need to stick around for next year, they opened some interesting design possibilities.
Wednesday Uncrate and Inspection at the Championship was awesome. I’d love to see this expand to open pits on Wednesday afternoon next year.
Classmate PC
Turn-key camera view “window”, diagnostics page w/ error message log for trouble-shootling, lightweight and relatively durable hardware.
Increased battery life and shorter boot-up time are areas for improvement, though.
The perfect game. Discussed elsewhere.
Dean’s List is a good concept, maybe next year it will be done right but I’m glad it exists.
My driver station never exploded this year.
Increase in qualification matches at every event I went to was a very very good thing. Thursday matches at Championship was awesome, I’m so glad they did that. My team played 33 matches at 2 events. I love that.
The easy alliance identification was very nice and spectator friendly.
Starting qualifications on Thursday allowed more time for meaningful field scouting too.
The more I watched the game, the more I liked it. Team Update 16’s tweaks made a big difference, particularly with ball penetration.
I did enjoy having to build something different (and likely tougher)–a flat-game drivetrain had to make some real sacrifices to keep its status.
Scoring was a fair bit easier to follow, and I thought autonomous was mostly well-rewarded.
I think playing Thursday in Atlanta is a good thing, as is getting ten matches in.
No-update updates worked well, even if they were the butt of a few jokes.
I also appreciate Bill Miller reaching out a bit more, both on his blog and on Twitter–even if he can’t necessarily respond to every question or fix every problem, keeping the human element in the FRC is important. Keep it up!
Allowing five CIMs was just right this year. I wouldn’t mind getting three or four in the kit, but at least they’re readily available.
Loosening the compressor rules was a nice olive branch, albeit a bit of an exercise in futility since nobody seemed to make a commercially-available compressor that matched the specs (let alone provided teams some design choices, such as duty cycle versus weight). Still, I liked the freedom in pneumatics rules.
Hopefully things keep rolling forward for 2011!