i completely agree that this year more than any other year before it did not allow for dominance of one bot in a match like 1114 last year. the point i was making was in regard to the human players. i was saying that the matches were decided by the bots and not the human players and that in matches with good bots that robots scored the majority of the points and decided the game.
There are several reasons why Lunacy was not a fun and exciting game to watch and play.
Dislikes
-The surface & wheels did not allow teams to be creative & unique. Almost every team had the exact same drive trains. with the exception of those w/ swerve ect… which didnt really give an advantage in this years game. Everyone was pushed around.
-Human Players were too involved for my taste. They should not have been allowed to throw into goals during auto. Rather only to load a robot. In some of the very close matches the balls the human players scored at the beginning of the match were often the difference. Dean always talks about how he doesn’t like the fact that people make a bunch of money/succeed for throwing or bouncing a ball, why have it play such a part in one of his games?
-Having a partner who cant play the game hurts you. I feel it should be neutral. If your partner didn’t show up for a match it was usually a death sentence if you were playing against three descent bots. In past years if a partner didn’t show up it wouldn’t hurt your alliance nearly as much. A dead trailer cost an alliance at least 26 points in auto. (13 the PS usually starts with)
-End game was boring. The only time I regularly saw a robot deliver the super cell to the trailer was when I watched 217. They had a great end game strategy. I started w/ first in 06 and since then every game had an exciting end game whether it be flying down the field last minute to get on a ramp (06,07) or placing a ball on top of an overpass. All were done by the robots not the human players like this year where they often shot the super cells.
-G14 I hope this is the only year for that.
-I was on Archimedes doing field reset on thursday and the camera man asked me what the game was so he would know what to film, **he thought the point of the game was for the robots to evade the HP throwing balls in to their trailer. **
-Bumper rules severely limited teams ability to design their robots to play this game.
-Defense, their needs to be a time limit a team can pin and then let their victim go. Their is a place for defense, but it can’t be disable a robot for the entire match, and then not be able to get out of it because there is no traction.
-Good scoring bots could not carry an alliance this year. Having bad alliance partners killed you in quals. Where as in previous years bots could cary an alliance in quals so the bots who could score would seed high.
Likes
-GDC took away questionable referee calls that plagued the 2008 season.
*Next years game will be one the most exciting ever, because it follows Luncay. FIRST went from polar opposites, a fast paced game (Over Drive) to an extremely slow paced game in 2009
The strategy aspect and the unpredictability factor made this game interesting to follow but the action was slow and the field cluttered with traffic jams and there was far too much going on to often follow. The game rates a C- and out of my seven years of FIRST I place it fith out of seven games.
Let me guess 03’ is at the bottom, I couldn’t figure that game out when I watched a video, I still think it’s which bot could knock over a ton of bin in auto, and then win. Maybe there was a bonus for ramps, I don’t really know.
2002 was my least favorite(it changed completely in the eliminations and became a boring pointless tug of war). I also realized my count was off. I’ve been around for eight seasons (time flies i suppose) so 2009 comes in sixth.
The list.
2004 (the robots were so athletic and amazing. Most Ohhhh/ahhh moments a FIRST game had.The game was so diverse)
2006(best game to watch)
2008(I thought it was a rather fun game to watch really. Especially when it’s played well)
2003(this game was better than it got credit for it’s only sin was giving way to many points for the top platform)
2007(not a bad game really but brutality at the championship showed it’s flaws and the endgame was frustrating and trumped all the hard work good teams did and they could do nothing to stop it)
2009( great at strategy but boring to watch)
2005(very vanilla to be honest)
2002(bleh)
In my 9 years…
Best
2006 - Aim High
2007 - Rack N Roll
2009 - Lunacy
2008 - Overdrive
2003 - Stack Attack
2005 - Triple Play
2004 - FIRST Frenzy
2002 - Zone Zeal
Worst
All in all I liked Lunacy a lot. I loved the changeup of not driving on carpet (though I think it is only fun when it is just that - a one year changeup). I loved the simple game dynamic of driving with a goal stuck to you. I loved the way the supercell brought excitement to the endgame (something that 2008 and 2005 really lacked). I LOVED the lack of robot penalties.
I did NOT like the fact that many of the build rules, taken together, made for very limited room for innovation. Too many robots looked the same (and if you limit your query to the subset of robots who were “elite” this season, there were basically only 3 or 4 winning designs out there). I also did not like how we chose a game piece that was almost impossible to find after kickoff (especially in the northeast).
The game itself was much more fun to play than to watch. Robots moved slowly, huge scrums were the norm, and there wasn’t a lot of “wow” factor.
I personally loved the game except for the human player aspect. IMHO, if they had let you put as many balls as you could fit in your robot, and then scattered the rest accross the field it would have become incredibly robot focused, i think that would have been a better way to go. Maybe you could allow the human player to shoot super cells, but i would have been fine without human players except for as super cell administrators.
I started the season really liking Lunacy:
Likes:
-The field floor removed the advantages that most veteran teams had with regards to drivetrains. No more 8-motor, 8-wheel drives that had been refined for a decade. It was also much safer to test because you didn’t have to worry about a high-torque robot spinning out of control and injuring someone. Robots could be restrained with a single person to test drive.
-The inability of dominant robots to really dominate. It required a team effort, which made alliance selection and scouting a much bigger aspect of the game.
However, after watching 1.5 regionals and the championship, I ended up strongly disliking it.
Dislikes:
-It’s boring. This isn’t so much a field or robot slowness complaint (I liked the low-friction surface so much I hope FIRST uses an only slightly-gripper version in all future games), but a crowding complaint. With all the trailers on field, it was near-impossible for a game to run really smoothly without bunching up. I never got the hang of being able to tell at a glance which trailer was attached to which robot. There was no flow at all.
-Much too heavy reliance on human players. I had the same complaint for the 2004 game.
-Game task was too difficult to automate well. Much like 2007, there were very few robots (in fact, I never saw one on Newton) that could score reliably in autonomous.
-It was hard to tell if a team had super cells ready to go. It would have been cool to have a weight-activated sensor on the empty cell hook that lit up a light above that human player. You could maybe only aim that light at the crowd so the drivers would still have to pay attention.
This to me is the biggest issue with this game. I have brought many non-FIRSTers to watch events this year and every one of them said that there was always a lot of chaos and it was hard to follow.
I’ve said this before (okay, I say it after EVERY YEAR), and I’ll say it again: ever since the games went to 3 against 3, the games have been nearly impossible for casual observers to follow.
I also always propose this to the IRI powers that be: is it possible to run an hour of unofficial matches sometime during the IRI weekend as 2 vs. 2 just to see if it makes the game easier to follow? I still don’t know if that’s the cure, but I really would love to give it a try.
“If you have an opinion on something, it often says more about you than it does that thing.”
I’m learning a lot about a number of people just from reading this thread. 
-John
I really think this game would be been amazing on the typical carpet and not the new material. That’s pretty much the only gripe I have with this years game.
At our little dog-and-pony offseason event, we had 2v2 playing Overdrive. To my eyes, it made the game more exciting and easy to follow, and each robot had a trackball (if it wanted it).
It should be noted that the reason we did 2v2 is we only had 16 teams and a ton of technical difficulties, but I was happy with the outcome.
That being said, I believe the reason FIRST has gone 3v3 is the sheer number of robots competing. By putting six robots on the field instead of four, the playing time increases by 50%. At an event like IRI with 72 teams, each robot may play 3 or 4 times total in a 2v2 format. For some teams, LNHS is a long way to go to play three matches.
Since it seems en vogue to do so:
2006 Best
2009
2008
2005
2007 Worst
Many of these observations have already been made, but here’s my $(1/50):
Likes
- Regolith meant EVERYone had to design a drive train, not just grab one off the shelf.
- Trailers: Now that you’ve got a bin full of balls, you have to FIND where to put them!
- Few penalties! Great all-around action (even if some call that “boring”)
- Supercells mean you could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat (or the other way around, if you score in the wrong trailer! :ahh: )
Dislikes
- Regolith also meant a major static problem, at least in the early regionals until the GDC identified the problem and the solution(s). (Unfortunately, 811 was in a first week regional
) - Why couldn’t the trailer flags been pink OR green (or, heavens, red or blue)? The “pink on top means red” made it hard for the casual observer to figure out who’s trailer was whose. Yes, I know, the goal was to make the robots figure it out, but …
- … there was scant opportunity for autonomous mode. The uberteams obviously could get robo-targeting working, but most everyone else didn’t.
- Okay, I’ll say it: Too much emphasis on human players throughout the game.
- Weak partners, or a single breakdown, could doom an alliance. (Compare this to 2006 when we won even with one dead and one tipped partner.)
And my eight year ranking, from best to worst:
2004 - FIRST Frenzy
2007 - Rack n Roll
2006 - Aim High
2009 - Lunacy
2008 - OverDrive
2005 - Triple Play
2002 - Zone Zeal
2003 - Stack Attack
In the end, I think that Lunacy suffered from the same issue as several other game challenges in that the field was simply too crowded.
This made the game hard to watch from a spectator standpoint, and also made it hard for action to stay flowing, especially with sharp manuvering being difficult for many teams this year.
I think Lunacy would have benefitted from a wider field. Maybe that isn’t logistically possible, but I think it would have greatly improved the audience experience. Teams would have been able to keep moving better and defensive strategies would have needed to work harder for results.
It is my understanding that this is 100% true - the reason for 3 v 3 is to get the teams more matches. However, I think there are enough creative people to figure out how to get teams more matches AND have an easy to watch 2v2 game.
What about going back to pre-2000 and use two fields - reset one while a match is played on the other one. The big thing I would change from the pre-2000 days is to not wait until the most recent match is scored before starting the subsequent match. I think you can get down to a 4 minute turnaround this way.
Example:
Field A: Play match 1 (2:15)
Field B: Announce teams in match 2 (1:00)
Field B: Play match 2 (2:15)
Field A: Announce score from match 1 (0:15)
Field A: Announce teams in match 3 (1:00)
Field A: Play match 3 (2:15)
Field B: Announce score from match 2 (0:15)
Field B: Announce teams in match 4
etc.
Between the announcements and the match play, the field not in use should be able to be scored, reset, and ready to play while the other field is the center of the show. In the pre-2000 days they would score the current match before going on to the next one, which I believe adds at least one minute to the cycle time.
Anyway, that’s just a single idea - I’m sure other better ideas are out there.
Also - I’m glad to hear you got to try 2v2.
I’d like to see 2v2v2 itd make it interesting
For those of you who say that auton didn’t make a big difference I couldn’t disagree with you more. Some teams had to think more outside of the box, I am not a programmer but I know that we would not have had much success without the amazing auton that we did have. We had over ten autons this year and the most common one was to start in one corner and turn and go to load up right away, when we did this we put 17 moon rocks into our trailer, thats 34 points that we usually had the oppurtunity to dump rather fast, had we tried to load like this during human mode there is no doubt we would have been pinned there or dumped on, however we also had a “hook” auton so that we could avoid other robots when we went to load up or we also had the option to get an empty cell during autonand head to one of the corners to drop it offf. The best example I can give of this is Midwest, we were the only alliance to top 1625,111, and 1675 in just one match but we did this by having them set up their robots first so we could decide where we wanted to put ours (think 06) strictly for auton. We believe that matches were often won and lost during auton.
My rankings for years I saw in person:
2006 (Mostly spectator, best game ever because it was like a sport)
2009 (If you truely understood the strategy it was amazing)
2008 (tons of offense made this one fun)
2007 (Hard game to play mixed with a bad match algorithm and low scoring)
I think this game was absolutely amazing. Such a pleasure coming off of Overdrive. I think that this game embodied the meaning of FIRST’s creativity in that it gave teams so many different ways to be successful. Defense, Offense, and Bonus were all viable strategies to construct a robot around.
Oh and THANK YOU GDC for giving us a game to play defense in!
Perhaps a different take on some points?
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We have a student who’s a soccer player, and hasn’t really gotten into technical stuff much at all the previous three years. He got really excited about this game, and learned how to read complicated mechanical drawings, and learned how to fabricate stuff by building a trailer.
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The limited traction appeared to us to level the playing field enough that we were confident that we could do OK by just using the kit drive parts, and putting most of our design creativity into making a great ball handling mechanism. We didn’t even have to put nuts on our axle bolts, or worry about having very little chain wrap on the transmission sprockets. And no problems with tread wearing out!
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The highly protective bumpers and no expansion rules let us get away with building a relatively flimsy robot up top, as well as trying some “new” technology, desiging and building a stout wood chassis.
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The double/triple score rule encouraged us to build a robot that could score so well that we could win matches without needing supercells.
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Although there seemed to be only a few very effective design concepts, as usual there was a wide variety in robot designs, especially at the newer regionals.
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Having only one way to score (balls in trailers) allowed us to put all our design efforts into one mechanism, unlike 2007 where we split into two design/build groups, neither of which had enough resources do to their job well enough.
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Batteries lasted a long time.
edit: one more–my mom (74 yrs old) said watching the AZ regional was the most excitement she’s seen in a long time!
Dear GDC, please create a game for 2010 that Cory absolutely hates, we seem to have good luck with those 