OK i am sure i will get some heat for this thread but do you guys think first can go though this year without changing a rule. I my mind first has total screwed up in the past example the 2002 tether rule (sorry for spelling i am have a brain fart right now).
shaun
With all due respect, yes.
FIRST changes their rules. It’s what they do. All your life, you’re going to have to live with rules that may be just plain bad. You just have to live with them until enough peoole complain and they get changed.
Part of FIRST is engineering around challanges. See bad rules as a challange you will have to face your entire life. Corperate and Academic beurocracies are easily a thousandfold worse than FIRST.
Maybe you should think about the FACT that the reason why rules normally change after kickoff is because they listen to the teams and people. You think FIRST Staff spend the 6 weeks thinking how can we make the teams time hell by changing rules?
Last year was a major improvement with “the spirit of the rule” method introduced. This answered most questions about most rules. However, there are still a few teams and/or individuals out there whose “spirits” are not aligned with the rest of ours and therefore we have rule changes/clarifications. It is inevitable. Yes the 2002 tether ruling was a huge mistake but we have progressed from such mishaps.
To the best year yet!
I don’t think that FIRST will ever live down the tether rule, and I think that is why in 2004, the lawyer induced speech was necessary*.*
This is straddling, This is not… Use common sense.
Rules may change, but hopefully not as drastically as they did in 2002.
Plan accordingly.
Lets hope not.
I’m sorry, but what was this tether rule that is reffered to?
I didn’t start FIRST untill 2003.
No 
there was a zone in the 2002 game that if you could get any part of your robot in you would recieve 50 points…they made it very clear that if there was any possiblity of your robot become entangled in another robot there would be grave consequences…http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1856&highlight=entanglement this link will provide more accuracy of the exact wording of the rule.
anyways the first weekend at kennedy space center 312 and 59 tested exactly how strictly they were going to enforce this rule…on thursday 233 attempted to get entangled with 312’s tether but they couldn’t so ruling on tethers seemed to have been laxed from then on…then people began adding devices (up 'til the last day of nationals I saw people adding tape measures to their robot) that were much more probable of getting entangled, but were still allowed. (25 had a very similar tether to 312 & 59 so here’s a pic of 25’s tether)
It was messy…in answer to this thread…no in fact i bet they can’t go one week without changing a rule, but that’s just me 
p.s. sry for the history lesson 
i have no problems with first changing rules, i would be shocked if they didn’t. when they do a game design they try and think of all the options and situations that might come up and how they play out but when it comes down to it there are more of us then there are of them and so the game develops as build goes on thus causing the necessary rule changes/clarifications.
Personally i consider it a more reasonable request for FIRST to enforce rules, over the past few years i have witnessed teams breaking rules deliberately and FIRST does nothing. I don’t want to state any specific examples to single teams out but instances happen, and i know that teams should practice GP and most do but i would love to see FIRST put an iron fist down once in a while and enforce a rule they create.
well put greg i think you hit a better subject then me i also would like to see firststick to there guns when someone breakes a rule
I think that some rules will be changed. After all, change always has a reason. Yes things may happen that we don’t like or just don’t want but we have to accept it. Through my three years in FIRST I have definately learned to accept things beacuse complaining just leads to more and more problems.
Things happen and they always happen for a reason, if FIRST never changed anything we would still be competing with the original task in a small high school gym.