What has been everyone’s experience with the discs being counted after matches at the regionals?
At the Wisconsin regional, the discs were manually counted after every match. At the Midwest regional, we noticed that they weren’t counting the disks from any match (at least none that I saw).
Given some of the inaccuracies with the real time scoring, I’m surprised that they would rely 100% on the load cells. There were some matches which were ties. Not sure how they could declare that without counting the discs manually. Talk in the pits was of some anomalies with some of the scores…
I’m surprised there isn’t a standard practice of how this should be handled.
I can’t say I payed much attention at our competition, but I didn’t hear any talk of false scores. I would imagine that they would only need to count if a game was close, but that’s just my opinion, I’m fine with not knowing the exact score if there’s a clear winner. As for the closer games, I got nothing. I would try to get in contact with someone at FIRST.
From what I understand the standard practice is to either count the discs as they are removed at the end of the match (if there are a lot) or count them as they go in. Then this info is given to the scoring table who have to complete hard copy scoring sheets that are sent back to FIRST. At least this was the standard procedure that was followed at QCR and was described to me as “what was supposed to be done.”
But on a personal level, I still don’t care who ends up winning the tiebreaker very much. Not to that extent, at least. I only care about who wins because it determines who gets to keep playing with robots! Not to say that there aren’t many, many more (and better) reasons to care, but I’m just not that kind of guy.
I was a scorekeeper at the Boston regional this year and can tell you what the system was there at least, I do believe that this is the system used all over FIRST, but I cannot be sure.
We had 2 scorekeepers per side standing away from each other and counting the discs that went in. The most important thing to count correctly was the autonomous round, because after the match you could just take that figure and subtract it from the discs in the goals and get your teleop scores.
We were instructed to count throughout the match, if a robot released a frisbee during auto it counted as an auto regardless of when it went into the goal. This never really came into play from my experience, but it was something I was curious about and that is what the FTA told us.
At the end of the match we would take a look at the goals before emptying them to double check what we counted and make sure it was correct. If the goals were too full to count by looking up through the lexan goals we would clear the area, let the discs drop and count them individually.
We would turn in sheets with the discs we counted to the scorer and that would be the score posted post match.
This method was used at Boston, Connecticut, and the Pine Tree (Maine) events. As GA I spent the time between the end of the matches and when the scores were announced waiting for the accurate disc count.
At Pine Tree we had two people behind each alliance. They counted the autonomous discs going in, wrote it down on a form, then after the match dumped out the 1, 2 and 3 pointers separately, counted them up and wrote each sum separately, then ran the form to the scorekeepers, who did the arithmetic. I wasn’t directly involved with that part, but it seemed to be just a confirmation of the weigh-in. We did do weight tests Thursday and Friday with set number of frisbees. It appeared to be a good system, though I’m glad I didn’t have to dump discs on my head every 6 minutes.
Or, what jwfoss and jblay said when they sneaked in ahead of me.
At Midwest, it just seemed like they weren’t being counted…
In some of the highest scoring matches, the scores were up before we even got to our robot on the field. Tended to only seem like the auto scoring number plus climbs and fouls. It was too quick… And there were always disks unaccounted for and such. And there were akward jumps of many points in the score, so we didn’t know what to believe.
BTW, Wisconsin had great reset times and apparent disc counting.
Thanks for the info. I know volunteers were counting the discs during autonomous, but I never saw anyone count them after dumping them out of the goals. That was the reason for my question…
Unless the score is close, the real time score will be displayed overhead. If changed need to be made, the scorekeeper will go in and manually change it afterwards. The score on the big screen is not always the score that is published to the FIRST site and used for rankings.
I will say that at CT there was an issue with climbs not being scored properly always. We can climb after the buzzer and I had to check with the refs after each match we climbed after the buzzer to make sure it was scored correctly, this wasn’t exactly ideal considering the rules clearly state that you can keep climbing for 5 seconds after the match and them scoring it before those 5 seconds are over is, no other word for it, wrong. The most irritating part was that we could not see if the mistake was made until the score went up which was always after the bots were already off the field.
We provided field staff volunteers at all the events we attended this year, and they had this information on scoring.
At Kansas City there were 4 score keepers on each end, one concentrating each of the goals. They counted Frisbees as they went in and recounted them from the bins at the end of each match. After autonomous, the scores for each goal were given to a 5th person on each end who then verified the count in the goal and relayed the information to the official scorekeeper. This 5th person also helped verify the final count at the end of each match and relayed the final count to the official scorekeeper.
At Oklahoma City there were 3 score keepers on each end. During autonomous, two would watch from the front for Frisbees going into the goals and one would watch from the back to count and verify the total at the end of autonomous. The three on each end would then watch and work together to record goals during teleop. At the end of each match, Frisbees were counted as they were removed from the goals to verify accuracy. This count was given to the official scorekeeper at the end of each match and input before the score for each match was displayed.
I worked both CT & PTR as field reset. The Auto was counted as they went in & relayed to scorekeeper. If any Frizbees went in just after the Auto buzzer, they were counted as well. There was always at least 2 people counting at all times. With such a mass inflow of Frisbees during telop, the count was done at the end of the match. 90% of the Frizbees went in the top goal, so they were counted 1 by 1. At both CT & PTR I never saw any robots climbing after the end buzzer, so that 5 second rule was moot. If anything, occasionally one would droop down a little. The refs never counted robots until they stopped swinging.
