Well its not really a kit of parts any more, is it?
Its more of a scratching, clawing, begging activity.
Just because FIRST is not meant to be fair, does not mean that we need to go out of way to make it unfair.
I am not sure what they should call this new activity, but the kit of parts is long gone.
I don’t like the rat race aspect, either. But I’ll keep this system rather than going back to receiving a kit of parts consisting largely of items that we won’t use. Having more choice in the system makes it possible to more efficiently allocate donated resources where they’re likely to get used.
Consider it from a sponsor end, too - they can donate 80 or 800 of an item instead of needing to donate 2600, and they have a better idea that it’s going to get used this way.
FIRST Choice is certainly good… until you look at the competition done for parts, and how many teams can’t get what they actually want from it (How GP is it to order a ton of a particularly “in demand” item?). I’d much rather have a process that made obtaining parts a little more fair. Have 2-3 “rounds”, where each round consists of a week for teams to indicate their desires. At the end of the week, FIRST distributes items (or reserves them) for teams based on limits determined by the demand for each limit. In other words, if they have 10000 Talons, and 2500 teams each want several, then a practical limit of 4 is created for that round. At the end of the rounds, ship out the entire reserved order for each team.
At least, it would end the mad rush at the start, the sellouts, and give FIRST time to handle any issues that crop up.
Perhaps we can call it the “Gaget-Grab”.
It can go along with “Regional-Rush”…
-Mr. Van
Coach Robodox
After reading through the FIRST Choice thread on CD I thought that the restock was around 12:20 as well.
However my team (2583) placed our order at 12:03 and we just got an email saying we did not receive the talons or the digital sidecar.
On CD there are posts saying that the talons went out of stock at 12:18 and I was under the impression that this was the original stock and not the fake restocked talons.
It was certainly “restocked” after this: we were able to order at ~12:30 but won’t be getting them. However, I don’t believe the blog indicates that this was necessarily an isolated incident. Sorry you didn’t get them despite being able to get in immediately!
Quantity Limits is a good idea for high in demand goods, but I feel an even better solution could be a slower release of credits. If each team was given say 10 credits each hour over the course of ten hours (or 10, 20, 30, 40 over four hours), it would prevent one team from snatching all of the in demand goods, and it would mean that teams would only be rat racing for the items prioritized as more important, which likely varies from team to team. This would also reduce the problem of many TIMS main and alternate contacts being in the middle of lectures or business meetings when FIRST Choice opens because as long as they go in during the first hour they will likely get their most important item. Thoughts?
Edit: Although, this incurs extras shipping costs for multiple orders, which could prove very problematic, maybe reservation of items instead of placing an order as an option during the first day/few hours? I realize this is more complicated on AndyMarks end, but could probably make life a lot easier on teams, and if problems did occur, they would likely be easier to debug with smaller initial orders. Again, thoughts?
I can cancel my day for an hour. I cannot cancel my entire day or week. I want to do this once and be done with it, whether I get what I want or not.
Anyone else getting billed the same amount for shipping on now drastically reduced orders? I have a question out to AM about that.
What if we could pick ten items per week during this time before 2013 and have all of the parts requested ship to our kickoff locations, having one big shipment instead of individual ones for each team?
My shipping cost actually INCREASED for fewer items. I also have a question in about this…as well as whether or not the new order placed (presumably) tomorrow with the refunded credits can be added to the existing order or if we’re going to have to pay for shipping for two separate orders. 
I’m glad to see that, so far, this discussion is mainly a constructive one.
I think the best system is a strict limit on the quantities of all items. 1000 talons donated? Then no more than 1 or 2 per team can be ordered.
Then, after kickoff, release the unused quantities so teams can go back and snatch them up with their remaining points.
This serves two needs that I see. Most of the teams should get a little of what they want. When teams go back after kickoff, they’ll know what they need for the new game, and won’t use points on unrelated items.
Seconded. I realize the goal of this program is to give teams choice and stretch the available parts as far as possible, but this method is not working and is not the answer. A cut-throat, dog-eat-dog game of king-of-the-hill where you are at the mercy of a computer system which can’t keep up and half the teams leave feeling cheated? That is no way to distribute these parts fairly. The competition should be on the playing field, not for your KOP. We all pay the same fee for the KOP and what we end up with should not be a matter of random luck. A system where one team hits the jackpot with 10X the parts value of another team because they had less random trouble with the website? That’s wrong. I would prefer to have less with the old KOP system and feel fairly treated than to have a random possibility of more and end up feeling cheated.
Quantity limits and credit values which are proportional to the part value would go a long way to prevent what happened today. I can’t decipher the logic of a system where a motor and a laptop computer are given the same value. If parts cost what they are worth there would be no hoarding and less scrambling for the exits. Imagine a store on Black Friday where everyone is given the same money to spend, everything in the store is the same price, and there are no limits. The ones who made it through the doors first and can run the fastest get 10 flat-screen TVs. The ones who were behind 2800 others trying to get through the doors 1 minute later get 10 pairs of socks. 6 weeks later they meet in a competition to see who was able to make the most of what they got.
An item being marked as shipped usually just means that a shipping label has been printed, indicating the items were packed and the package is waiting next to the door for the UPS (or FedEx, etc) truck. Shipping companies usually come later in the evening and pick up all the packages in one go. Admittedly, unpacking everything would consume a lot of man-hours.
I totally agree with this.
I’d rather have the 1 size fit all, where we can communicate with other teams to trade parts, rather than not get the same good deal…i.e…computer, as some other team.
The idea of the vouchers though are great, IF, we are guaranteed to get any of the items that are on the list of available items.
Absolutely a make-sense great idea.
We also had the Drill + Talons in our cart and ordered, however we lost them due to the re-stocking bug. We weren’t able to get anything else either such as the cRIO/laptop/etc; our mentor ordered around 9:30 [PA time].
We might just load up on graphics cards and unload them somewhere… might keep one or two for the CAD rig. Even though these cards aren’t the CAD certified, they do help a lot and Solidworks [what i use] does utilize them. I have the 480GTX we got in 2011 running with 2 instances of SW on two monitors quite nicely.
With regard to the Talons, here’s one option that would be fair:
- Cross the Road donates 480 Talons to FIRST.
- FIRST Gives the Talons to AndyMark to sell in their store.
- AndyMark increases the amount of their product donation voucher by $11.
480 x 60 / 2600 = ~11
At this point I would gladly trade in many of my credits for some more PDV. Even after the log in issues of being a sub-1000 team I had a cart with most of what I wanted just to have it disappear while checking out. Then to get the e-mail stating that I didn’t get what I thought I got. I am very disappointed in the way things happened.
I do feel that giving teams 100 credits and have a mad rush for parts was another mistake. Give us ~40 to make initial grabs yesterday and then the give us 160 after kickoff. Keeps teams in check for those awesome deals. Some teams got in and got a ton of their top choices and some of us were left with the scraps. I feel like the other 100 after kickoff will not be worth much now. I also wonder if I will be able to get things that were my second and third choices now. I used the credits I had to get things I didn’t get? I skipped on things I would have ordered but didn’t because I thought I was getting something else. I just hope my team is not left paying for shipping of a bunch of stuff that will just be “stuff”.
[quote=“FRC”]
"*The system was tested before being put in use, but the tests did not include team numbers under 1000 or placing orders at the rate actually experienced when the system went live at Noon today.
*
Words cannot describe the absolute feeling of WHAT I have right now.
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Who wrote this test plan?
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Why is the login process for teams < 1000 different than >= 1000?
Trying to be positive - a great take away from this is always thoroughly test your code[/quote]