It is understandable to be excited or speculate on next year’s game. This can lead to some great discussions and indepth theory crafting. All this speculation is of course absolutely fine.
However. It is NOT ok to leak content, misrepresent something as a leak, attempt to crack any passwords on game resources, discuss ways to do so or otherwise “hack”. FIRST is modifying how they approach gamepiece orders and the like this season, so the line may be a bit blurred. There are good reasons these rules are in place, the past has not been incident free.
I don’t want to be “old man yells at cloud”, but please think about how you are presenting things- Is it fact? Speculation? Analysis of a teaser?
Do not post any leaks or unauthorized releases about new games (in whole or in part, including the playing field, game elements, or the manual) or new products. The moderator team will err on the side of caution and remove any content that could be considered a leak or unauthorized release.
Do not discuss hacking or cracking encrypted manuals, robot control systems, field management system, or any other devices or computer systems. The discovery of any bugs, flaws, or security vulnerabilities that can allow teams to gain an unfair competiton advantage must be privately reported to the applicable parties. FIRST has established the following page for reporting vulnerabilities:
More than just CD policy, and being a decent person, if things are leaked eventually FIRST will change how they give info to vendors/volunteers or crack down on what information they give out in advance in general
Leaks are why Kickoff events no longer get the field element (at home) designs ahead of time. They can’t build a replica, buy parts for it, plan until after the kickoff video because someone shared pics/info before it was time previously. FIRST decided to nip the source of potential leaks and now no one gets it early. Don’t spoil what little preseason info we get from FIRST by making them not want to share anything anymore.
Edit: On a side note I really really miss the Kickoff field elements. That was a main draw of going to an in-person kickoff event to see the field in person and see the field elements and how they work IRL before you build them yourself. Ask the people who built them there what the difficult parts are, tips and tricks, etc. I get why FIRST stopped this, but I wish we could have it both ways still.
FIRST had a community of volunteers who wanted to give their time to create these field elements, to give players a chance to explore and touch a full-scale model of the court that they’d be playing on in just a couple short months. FIRST told these volunteers thanks but no thanks, we value the integrity of the secret more.
They were also subtly different from the real elements in ways that I disagreed with from an engineering perspective several times. I’m ok that part of the program is now left to teams.
And even if you do leak something, there’s a good chance no one will believe you. See this post from before 2017’s Kickoff:
I don’t think anyone paid any attention to this in the wake of other speculation, but this person seemed to know something, whether that was someone with access to Kickoff materials or an actual insider.
Or perhaps it was a lucky guess balanced out by the failed prediction of the absolute fool who did reply to it:
Based off the user name, join date, lack of team number, and singular post. I think it is safe to assume they knew something. At least they kept it relatively vague and didn’t spill the beans too bad.
Rumor at the time was FIRST was receiving complaints that teams who hosted kickoffs had an advantage due to seeing the field early and thus were winning events. This was also somewhat of a common complaint on Delphi.
Whether FIRST believed this or not they did chose to stop letting teams have access to this.
Well to my knowledge most of the host teams stayed just as competitive as before (because there was no real advantage) so if this was one of the reasons maybe it can eventually be reversed
I may be misremembering but didn’t the field leak early morning kickoff too? I thought I remember someone sending me a post from reddit or maybe discord with the airship in the middle and some other elements.
I’ve seen this one before (looking at you 2019 cardboard VR viewer, sponsored by magna? I think).
With a real VR setup it might be useful. Cardboard was silly especially with 0 locomotive control. You could peer around from set positions on the field, but not actually examine anything up close from what I can recall.
It did, one of our students opened the field CAD open about 30 mins before the animation was played. I think the CAD used to be hosted on the Solidworks website and they made it public a few hours too early
To the best of my recollection no recent game (save 2020) has survived without a substantial leak prior to kickoff (if even by minutes). The reasons vary, technical (one of the archives used very weak encryption one year), procedural (early publishing), or just straight up human action (oops someone said something they shouldn’t have).
The reality is the wider the circle of people “in the know” the more likely you are to have a leak. FIRST has tried to do what it can to plug those leaks by tightening up documents, distribution, and those in the know, but, fundamentally, they’re fighting an uphill battle.
As to the issue with field elements at kickoff events, I very much miss them too. I do recall that our local kickoff had them built by a handful of trusted mentors the day or two before kickoff, and that they more-or-less sequestered themselves from their team until the reveal. I get FIRST’s position in trying to close that potential leak, and understand some teams complaints about possible inside-early-knowledge, but wonder if there is a way back to that that mitigates both concerns…
At the very least FTC still does this. At kickoff I got to see a built field and see the interactions between the game pieces and the field. It’s a shame FRC can’t do this.
FTC fields and elements are cheap enough to buy and the assembly is relatively fast. It’s mostly snap together, zip tie the important stuff in place and done. It can be done in the time between the video ending and lunch finishes for teams to view. In FRC each field element can take hours to build, not to mention needing to gather raw materials from X number of hardware stores or in some years order a specific custom doohickey you can’t make yourself accurately.
The FRC kickoff field crews (2-3 adults to minimize people in the know) would need at least a day or two to build them from scratch.
Maybe a compromise would be releasing the B.O.M. for the at home props before kickoff with 0 plans of what to do with the raw materials. Now teams could make sure to stock before kickoff and have the materials ready to go. At least then they could reasonably work with the teams at the kickoff event to put it together before they all leave for the day.
