What could FIRST stand to improve upon?
Minute Maid Park is the shiniest newest circle of hell. With it’s obnoxious manicured lawn, overstimulated customer unfriendly security detail and overpriced and underwhelming food. Enjoy your stay…
I hope FIRST never does business with these people again.
I think that no matter where you stand on any of the issues that are undoubtedly going to be ranted about here, I think a little more transparency never hurts. Being up-front about any major issues would lend a great deal of credibility towards not only HQ but volunteers, officials and anyone who actually was involved in the issues that transpired during the course of this season…
As for my personal experience, I think their game design shouldn’t be so dependent on forced interplay (note not coopertition), or at the very least they need to be more cognizant of it. Games where you are bound by luck tend to dishearten a lot of people.
FIRST could have let the people at the robot entrance at MMP know what was going on so we wouldn’t have to explain why we could not take our robot through the metal detectors…
And we were the lucky ones, I felt even more bad for all the teams behind us that had to wait in the sun forever to get their robots and carts into the pits. The pits which were on top of filthy uneven plastic covers on top of dirt.
Did that actually happen? If so, YIKES!
Yes, it did. We were the first ones through so I’m pretty sure they caught on after that. Although we did also have a bit of sneaky putting pocket knives into the robot before going through the metal detectors. Not sure what they were looking for considering every pit down there probably had a box cutter or two in it.
I’m gonna grouch about game design that is driven by the theme, rather than the inverse.
- Fouls and missed climbs had too much influence over match outcomes. Fuel had too little (for 95%+ of teams).
- The fuel shooting task was too hard. A bigger goal, higher point reward per ball, a backboard or non-horizontal opening, and/or larger protected area would have helped to make this a worthwhile task for more teams.
- The lines of sight on the field were bad for drive teams and for spectators.
- Many webcasts only had cameras on the scoring table side, so you couldn’t even see action around the boiler. The 3-camera setup used for the Championship webcasts (at least, until Houston Einstein…) was pretty good, though. Also, many webcasts had the red and blue sides of the scoreboard reversed relative to the on-field action, which was super disorienting.
- The field was too complex and broke often. Touchpad maintenance happened after pretty much every match. Boiler counters remain a mystery to me (almost every time we counted balls on video, we got a slightly different count than the boiler did). The initial version of the springs and touchpads had some deficiencies.
- I like that ranking by average RPs eliminates standings churn due to different numbers of matches played, but it could still be improved. We need to see both pieces of information (average RPs and total) next to each other or we end up doing the same math we had to do before. Also, tiebreakers need to be applied on a match average basis.
- This isn’t new, but it still stinks that robots take so long to connect to the field and frequent radio reboots remain a thing.
- Pretty much everything about the production of the Houston Finale and Einstein. But this has already been beaten to death.
- I know there are whole threads about this and I hear the other side, but I still think it’s silly that we give out one Woodie Flowers award yet crown two Champion alliances and two Chairman’s teams. This makes WFA the de facto hardest-to-win (and therefore by some metrics, highest) award in FIRST.
- I think it’s time to shake things up on Einstein. Blair and Dave are at their best on the floor, and we should acknowledge that the FIRST Champs Live crew is much, much better at providing meaningful and insightful post-match analysis.
- 2 Championships
Championship awards for each field please! Putting two fields together for awards doesn’t make sense to me.
Added: game needed a way for a kitbot to score… maybe an opening in the boiler at ground level where a kit bot could push balls into the goal.
Do not ever do a game again where the primary scoring objective occurs a foot off the ground, in a location pinched between a wall and a boxy robot which is then further obscured to half the audience by the field design, and to the entire audience if it’s at a district venue with people standing around the field and low-down seating, and which is visually dull/seemingly unchallenging/terribly unexciting to audience members who have not personally struggled with the intricacies of mechanism design or the finicky nature of the field.
Do not present the primary scoring objective as a secondary scoring objective through the game design, field setup, theming, and diminishing returns/hard capped scoring mechanics, encouraging teams who will inevitably overestimate the performance of their partners, their opponents, and themselves to allocate huge chunks of robot space for a secondary objective only to abandon it entirely at their first event, leaving them stuck with the extreme spatial constraints the secondary objective’s mechanism forced upon their primary objective mechanism.
Do not make a task with a rare combination of technical challenge, diverse viable design possibilities, and audience appeal, and nerf its value so much that any team but the elite of the elite is likely actively hurting their alliances by spending time on it, or at least is doing so indirectly due to the design/resource allocation discussed above. Do not do games, or elements of games, where you must be phenomenal to be useful in the slightest.
This is really the core of the issue to me. It’s not that fuel was too hard. Being 254-level good at fuel was very hard, but being 254-level good at anything is hard every year. The difference was, this year, if you weren’t 254-level good or very close to it, there was no point in even trying, and that’s a discouraging experience for teams. In just about every other shooting game, there is a huge spectrum of shooter quality, but for teams in the middle, or even teams near the bottom of that spectrum, it’s among the more valuable things they can be doing during a match at any given time, and both initial success and incremental improvement are huge victories for these teams. 2012, for example, we built a robot that mostly played a backcourt sweeper/passer role and wasn’t very accurate at all, but I remember how thrilling it was for our team during that one quals match where the autonomous hit the basket perfectly and it made the difference. This year gave no opportunity whatsoever to start slow and improve with regards to the shooting task. You either started out elite, or you were better off throwing in the towel.
This is very true. I hated walking around the pits at regionals and seeing so many fuel mechanisms that are solid in overall design, but never end up getting used because they don’t have a chance to score >40kpa. It was such an all or nothing thing. I feel very bad for all the teams that didn’t get to play such an interesting part of the game because it doesn’t contribute nearly as much to their match wins.
Probably looks more suspicious having a knife in a robot than a toolchest though.
That was mostly a last second, “let’s not get this taken away” kind of thing. Although I did realize I went through with a few buttons in a pocket so I’m not sure if they were even turned on.
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Basketball may be possible without a backboard for elite players who dunk and shoot threes in the net. The rest of us need a backboard, and I doubt that elite players would ever get to elite status if they didn’t get to practice with a backboard first, so probably basketball wouldn’t have ever become a popular sport.
This year’s game was very much like basketball would be, if every shot was worth 1/3 of one point, there was no backboard, you had to play with a wiffle ball, and you could score 40 points by carrying a sandwich plate across the court to your buddy six times.
So, kudos to the teams that figured it out and scored only gears. It’s a shame that they had to be super-sleuths to figure it out though. Fuel was the trappiest of traps.
In order of importance:
Don’t how the felid network works in depth.
Bag and tag is still a thing.
The feild needed to be more mechanically reliable, especially the pegs.
Overal the relationship between fuel, foul, & climb scoring was poorly balanced.
Fouls for the gear loading zone we’re too high and it’s proximity to the other alliances peg caused it way too often.
+1
Blair and Dave are great on the field, but don’t give any insightful information when it comes to commentary on Einstein
I think that the low goal should have been on the floor. The low boiler was used by almost no one, but if it had been on the floor it would opened the fuel game up to all teams. Also, it would have made for some incredibly interesting strategies.
There are a number of issues this year I’ve been meaning to post once this thread came up, and I’m sure I will forget some and post several more times as I remember. This one focuses on the game / field.
What makes this season disappointing for me isn’t that it was obviously a train wreck from start to finish, like 2015. This was a game that could have been among the best FIRST has ever done, and they / we blew it on execution. It could have been good, and it just wasn’t.
The point balance of this game was atrocious. The only reason the game worked out at all from a competition standpoint is because the gear and hanging scores maxed out on both sides. It became a game of execution, with a series of near-mandatory game tasks that you must complete before going on to any other game task. Overcoming a missed climb with rotors or fuel was extremely difficult. Overcoming a down rotor with fuel was also extremely difficult. It became the worst kind of execution game - where one mistake spelled complete disaster for an alliance that most teams just could not possibly come back from.
The field build quality and consistency was unacceptable. The field arrived at events around the country, unfinished and incomplete. Hardware was not provided that was necessary. Mounting holes weren’t drilled. Weldments weren’t completely welded. Items weren’t square to each other or the proper dimensions. Thousands of volunteers did what they could to minimize the impact of this with their hard work, but that is just not something we should demand from them.
A variety of atrocious rules and precedents persist. Rules which probably should exist in some form, yet are wildly, wildly misinterpreted (ejecting a gear rule). Rules which are psychotic overreactions to fringe strategies seven years ago (the red card for E-stop usage rule). The rules that penalize teams for the field choosing to break in your match, even if the failure was the result of repeated fatigue over several matches (touchpad rules). I’m sure I’m missing many of them.
The definition of a “field fault” has been butchered beyond belief to the point where it is essentially impossible for one to be called at this point. The idea that a field fault can’t be caused by the actions of a robot is an idea that needs to be thrown in the garbage and never revisited again. All field elements that will ever break, in any FRC game that will ever exist, will break when exposed to some sort of outside force. The only source of outside forces on an FRC field, during a match, are robots! Robots will always be the “causes” of a field element failure. And yet, this year, since the field was so shoddily designed, the rules of the game were changed so that you would not get a replay for broken field elements, if you broke them! I sincerely hope this bad rule doesn’t stick around like the E-stop rule or the tiebreaker rule.
Additionally, the specific nonsense about how one, or even two, bent or broken pegs not being a field fault? “There’s still a peg to score on!” is the most garbage rationale I have ever heard for this common practice. Imagine in 2014, that half of the high goal collapses in the middle of the match, preventing balls from entering it. Any rational person would have gone “oh wow, that is a field fault, let’s fix it and replay the match”. But under the logic demonstrated in the 2017 game, the existence of the other half of the high goal would have been enough to deny a replay. This is a situation directly analogous to a broken peg or two.
The low goal was absolutely and totally worthless. It was not at floor height, so it required a dedicated mechanism to work. It was in fact so high off of the ground that short robots had very little means to actually score in it. It was just a joke. Did anyone have any actual expectation of anyone using this goal? The only cute strategy it could be used for was to force an overflow situation, but this was basically never going to happen.
More to come later, when I’m not so tired and burnt out.
**^**This would have made thousands of field volunteers very happy. Just sweep all the balls into the boiler and let the low indexer count them into cardboard bins! 
I agree with you for the most part, but I have to disagree here. I worked field reset at a few events, and springs breaking happened almost every other match. Events would never finish if we replayed every single match that a spring broke. Should FIRST design a more robust field that isn’t prone to breaking so often? Absolutely. But in this case, there were plenty of teams that didn’t break springs. If you were constantly breaking springs in the middle of a match, your robot design may need some work. The springs won’t break unless you break them. I think that springs were bad for the reason that it was a judgement call before every match to determine a “good” spring from a “bad” spring. But springs breaking mid-match is not a reason to replay the match. Also, if a spring breaking in a match warrants a replay, what is stopping a team from breaking a spring on purpose if the match starts to go poorly?