What happened in 2013 that FIRST could stand to improve upon?
The real time scoring left much to be desired.
Need more districts. Now.
The afterparty wasn’t just unappealing it was overcrowded and dangerous. The food was rather nice though.
Einstein ran far far too long AGAIN.
The season ended. Not cool.
Definitely agree with the scoring. Last year’s auto scoring was quick and accurate, and match resets were quick as well, allowing more qualification matches for each team at champs. I missed that.
Also, no captain’s armbands during champs?
I didn’t like the difficult to enforce rules like the 54" cylinder, whether or not a climbing robot bumped the corner post in the next zone, whether or not a robot was touching the pyramid when it got bumped (when it was close.)
There isn’t very much, but FIRST can’t be changing big rules at the end of build season, our team built a ground intake because we thought human players would be able to throw lots of frisbees full field. Also, real time scoring was a problem.
I mean, with all the frisbees being shot, it was really hard to get the score and you also had to see how many fell out. So this years game was just hard to keep up with
FIRST changed that rule as it was a major safety hazard they didn’t forsee and didn’t know about until the week 7 scrimmages, I do not hold it against them, even though I understand your point.
I know that was the reason, and I definitely agree to it, but 3 days before build season ended was just poor timing.
Oh… Sorry I must have misread your post.
And while we’re at it I think FIRST should test their games actually playing matches. I don’t know if they do or not, but I think if they did it would prevent this sort of things from happening. It’ll be terrible logistically for the GDC though.
The inconsistency of counting game pieces at some regionals.
The video quality on the webcast of some regionals. Would love this to be consistent and good.
The sooner we get everyone to Districts the better off all of FIRST will be. I hope they come up with a good system to handle those of us in remote areas (maybe read some of the threads on CD for a few ideas 
) but I’m willing to be inconvenienced on what competitions we can attend short term for the huge economic benefits. Plus I think forcing the system may be the best way to spur growth in the areas that haven’t seen it.
FIRST needs to stop using custom/rare game pieces. There have been a few games where it would have been easy to use a standard size, readily available game piece without needing to tell the suppliers about it and they’ve gone to custom or hard to find ones every time (this year stands out in particular). Orbit balls (2009) are still the only game piece that I think they have made any legitimate attempt at this, but it was made by a single supplier that stopped producing it at the worst possible time.
Not to brag or anything, but Crossroads and Buckeye were streamed in 720p.
ninja-edit: Midwest districts pls
Commercials during webcasts
Lets do this in Sections:
The game:
Nothing to really complain about besides another shooting game in a row which as a complaint is the most minor one I have ever had.
Kick-off:
I honest to god thought that when they began to announce the game it was a joke being played on us since it happened so early and with no fan fair. Give us some heads up.
Build Season:
If the purpose of the Q&A is not to answer hypotheticals or design specific questions. How about we make a system that does?
The new Jaguars were horrid and I am sure many teams who used Jags as their main controller, such as my team, will never use them again.
Regionals:
Nothing to complain about here Orlando and South Florida are still great events, in great areas with tons of space and easy access and I would recommend any teams from out of state or country to consider these events when picking regionals.
Champs:
As a team who went to Champs via wait list I will freely say, I wish FIRST would make a decision by week 3 saying: “Because of field reset times and the desire to give teams as much playing time as possible the number of wait list teams given will only be enough to make the divisions equal this year.” 100 teams is way to much and to just vent a little among the top 8 teams in Newton my team played with 1 and against 1, and I am sure that their are teams who can say “We played against 4 and that was it.” or “We never played with or against any of them”.
FIRST has evolved beyond our current structure for Champs and something needs to change. To many teams, not enough time, speeches go on for way too long. At the dean’s list presentation our team had to leave before the 3 college representatives finished speaking for our match but I did hear what the Representative from MIT said about making this longer and I wouldn’t be opposed to saying “Load in Tuesday night, practice is first half of Wednesday then matches start Wednesday afternoon” This would have given teams 4 more matches minimum with only needing 1 more day off from school.
We have big huge screens showing our rankings hanging above our heads, why couldn’t we have another screen with no audio showing us the field? This also would have allowed for people in the pits to see the opening ceremonies and the start of eliminations.
Pit Admin should be centrally located among the four fields being on Newton it was a great location but It must have been a hike for Archimedes.
Now here is the big one for me and this resulted in a conference with Pit admin:
When returning from a match a woman from Underwriters Laboratory stopped my crew and asked us which division we were in, when we told her it was Newton she said well all newton teams have to walk around the other way to return to our pits meaning instead of walking along the area meant to lead on to the stadium field Newton would have to walk around all 3 divisions. Since there was 5 other teams from Newton with me the coaches all said that can’t be right and to let us go the way we came and we would consult pit admin and ask them to make an announcement or send someone to all the pits if this was the case. She agreed and let the other 5 teams go but when we tried she actually grabbed the handle that we use to pull our cart out of our Human Players hands and said “Well all of you can’t go that way” and pulled our cart sharply resulting in our robot falling out. Another person from Underwriters saw this came over told her to leave, assisted us in getting our robot back on and personally escorted us to our pit.
Now here is what I have gathered from this experience:
The women felt that since the coaches on the other 5 teams were all men who looked 30+ years old that she could pick on my team since I am the coach and will freely admit that I do not look any older then a Sophomore in High School.
Unless the robot is in danger of hurting someone no one (volunteer, ref, safety personal, Dean, Woody) should touch your robot our your cart without your teams permission.
The people from Underwriters were very good to us when we all went to Pit admin and explained the situation, they even stated that if anything broke they would go speak to the machine shop about having us cut in line. I feel this was one member of one company who was not doing what should have been done and should not have her actions reflected on her company, I just felt this story needed to be told and this was the thread to do it in.
Overall:
Even though this post was much longer then my positive one I felt this was one of the best games and seasons I have ever experienced
Unfortunately those are from the website hosting the stream. FIRST/the webcaster has no control over this. BUT, you can install AdBlock (Google Chrome extension) and it’ll get rid of those pesky ads and more.
I feel like this needs to be in writing somewhere. Our team had this happen this season and it was completely unacceptable. We were lucky that our robot did not fall.
Does Adblock really take care of those? I guess we never installed it at our shop.
It does; with Ustream, I never see a single ad.
The Game: I must say that this might have been one of the hardest games for refs this year. I saw refs that I know and trust struggle at times. To many ambiguous rules left to many things open for the head ref to interpret. Also the nets caused sight line problems that were difficult to overcome. The GDC really needs to put more thought on how the game design effects the refs.
Real Time Scoring: need I say more than what’s already been said.
The Champs: Too many teams in each division. Less teams attending champs or more divisions, something has too change. For the most part the top 8 teams are determined by luck of the schedule not on field performance. Saturday afternoon = just way to long, speeches go too long as usual. FIRST really needs to do something about this, it really ruins the finals. Seating, the way the dome is arranged there isn’t near enough seats for teams during opening ceremonies or Finals. Open the upper decks or arrange the fields like Atlanta.
I think the speeches on Einstien went on for too long this year. Imagine if at any other competition the speeches were plentiful and went on for this long. We want to make FIRST exciting, not bore the audience.
Another thing that’s already been beaten to death is that we had 8 matches. This needs to be fixed for next season. Maybe 400 teams is too many.
The champs webcast quality left something to be desired. Even if it was not possible to broadcast in 720p with 4 fields running due to bandwidth, they probably could have gotten 720p at least for Einstein.