I have spent way too much time posting on this in my overlap the season thread but I do not want - and more importantly teams with extremely low/shaky human and financial resources do not want - to be artificially forced into a situation where our teams have to put in anywhere close to a full robots’ worth of TIME toward becoming competitive for next season. That TIME would be much better spent stabilizing the sustainability aspects of the team. Fundraising. Recruiting. Training. It would also be better spent collaborating with other teams - others in need of assistance to get caught up and ready to play.
By the way, the 2021 season right now has a decent chance of not even being played, if we’re all being real with ourselves. So why should we be goaded into spending even more money and time on a robot that may NEVER see the light of day on a competition field?
[Aside: Contrary to the jokes, we cannot keep rebooting this game infinitely. I have said IR could fall on the sword twice but it would be fairly crazy to ask the community to accept the same game a 3rd season in a row. If things aren’t figured out by the time 2022 rolls around and we can’t expect a new game and a new competition season that is fairly guaranteed to occur, then we will all have much bigger problems than robots to worry about.]
Finally, if people are worried about the top level teams “over-iterating” their already perfect-ish robots to an extreme point, widening competitive gaps, then I suggest we do what I suggested in the other thread and simply toss a brand new game at them at kickoff. This is the game to be played in 2022. They are incentivized to work on a brand new robot and that option is also given to any team that feels like they would rather dump their time into that endeavor than working on a reboot robot. That option also does not penalize the many many many low-resourced teams that absolutely will have ZERO interest in making what they did in 2020 obsolete via major IR game changes.
That would provide all the creative opportunities in the world and would let HQ focus on the most important improvements - NOT big game changes just for the sake of giving people more stuff to do, but doing things like fixing the field shortcomings (jam points), tweaking penalties/scoring, and improving the game pieces or what have you.
My team definitely won’t be able to get into our shop over the summer, and there’s a pretty good chance our school (if it opens at all) won’t allow any extracurriculars to meet in the fall. Maybe, hopefully, we’ll be allowed to have at least a couple people in the shop at a time by January. We can spend the next seven months brainstorming, CADing, and trying to write code, but I predict our capacity to actually make changes in real life will be very limited.
For this reason I’m hoping for minor changes - enough to incentivize teams to make minor robot improvements, or add additional mechanisms, if they have the time/money/shop access, but not so much that showing up with this year’s bot unchanged would put you out of the running. Making the control panel scorable at lower levels of play comes to mind, but I’m sure there are also other opportunities.
People keep saying this and it really makes me question the effectiveness of some mentoring or build season/preseason strategies. If anything I’ll have more time to teach students.
I agree that you might have more time to teach them theoretical stuff, but it’s hard to teach them how to actually design a robot for a game if basically the whole robot is already pre-built.
No, obviously we don’t, but I don’t expect anyone of us not looking at other bots for inspiration. Seems kinda unlikely to actually come up with a whole new bot without any influence now. But it’ll also be a fun challenge.
Some kids learn better by doing. If we have enough resources that they can still learn that way, then that’s great and we’ll work that in with the game replay. “It’s harder to teach” does not imply a perfect robot for anyone. If you don’t see any potential challenges or changes in mentoring students for a game replay then you either have the perfect team (Nice, best of luck at theoretical Einstein!) or frankly you’re being incredibly shortsighted.
There are also people that learn better by taking an existing thing apart to understand how it works, rather than trying to design it themselves from scratch.
I will certainly miss having the opportunity to break down and analyze a completely new game next year, but I’m looking forward to the amount of time this will give teams to iterate on their designs.
I also voted for minor changes. I have no idea what the school availability will be like next year, I have no idea what mentor availability will be like next year, and with the possible exception of the $4k we got back from Smoky (which I won’t count until it’s directly back in the team account) I don’t know our budget.
Also: FIRST is sitting on about 150 events’ worth of this year’s balls, and has never shot an inflatable ball. I would not expect or really want a ball change.
Something I floated to a couple folks: Infinite Recharge, but unlimited height in your Target Zone. Go ahead and eliminate virtually all ball variation–if you want to invest in building a whole new robot.
The process of build season is the joy and learning experience, more so than competing in some ways. I have an excellent group of seniors next year and hope we have the opportunity to see what they can accomplish. A fresh challenge for the game, or reason to adjust brings more excitement than do it better.
Less resources just becomes a design constraint. Low resource teams already reuse parts of of past years robots. The reduced funding is a “first world” type problem.
The power of FIRST in some ways is the student motivation. Mentors realizing there is more to do is good, but we need the students to embrace it.
I voted for minor changes since for my team there’s still a very significant amount of iteration and learning to be done, even if the game was the exact same.
I also have a slightly different view of the categories. I think basically any reconfiguration of existing assets would be a minor change (including rearranging field elements), and that the threshold between “minor” and “significant” is that in “minor” you might have to interact with an existing element in a new way, or your priorities might shift on what you want to do or from where, whereas a “significant” change would involve interacting with a new element.
One “significant” change I would like to see would be potentially a new ball, the existing one simply gets destroyed too easily when teams have higher powered shooters. It’d be best for the new ball to closely match the old ball in size and squishness, but keeping the old ball seems like an accident waiting to happen with competitions running out of good balls.
Oh absolutely. I was like that as a student and I am still like that today to some extent. There are also students on the team who really get into the competition part of FRC, and they’re digging replaying the game too.
Hopefully there’s enough between a game replay and COVID-19 restrictions to keep everyone happy and engaged no matter what you like about FRC. It is not the situation everyone signed up for, but it’s the one we have.
While I truly enjoy mentoring the team through the process of analyzing a new game and developing a clean sheet design, I am actually quite excited with the challenge of taking the current robot design and optimizing it a bit more for the current (or slightly modified) game. There are some skills and engineering design processes involved in design optimization that we rarely get the chance to exercise in FRC. Honestly, in the ‘real world’ of industry we spend a lot more of our time improving existing products than we do developing completely new clean sheet designs. I am excited to see what can be done if we are given a second shot at a really awesome game. I’m not anticipating that we will completely overhaul our robot, but I am convinced that there are many incremental improvements that can be made to chip away at our cycle time and improve our shooting accuracy that will add up to a massive difference in performance.
I know that the students are having a hard time seeing things this way. Our challenge as mentors for this next 9 months will be to create a level of excitement around optimization. If we can get the students excited, next season is going to be really fun to watch with so many teams operating at a level that they have not been able to achieve in the past.
And, I am hopeful that if they can see what is possible when we iterate and optimize, that we may take some of those lessons and use them in future seasons to help our iteration processes during the season.
As a student I voted for significant changes, this is for a few reasons. Firstly, I would like build seasons to have a purpose. By that I mean, I think that if we don’t have major changes build seasons will feel no different from the weeks leading up to it. Secondly, it seems to me that not having major changes will make it so teams with more resources will have significant advantages. Those teams would simply be able to spend the entire summer/fall prototyping and refining their robots. Well teams who don’t have the same amount of resources or access to their shops year round will be at a disadvantage.
However, realistically I think we will only have minor changes. Cost saving, little development time, and the complications in producing new game/field elements being factors in this.
You should be able to play the key game functions without modifying this year’s robot. Key game functions to me are shooting the ball and climbing. The ball size cannot change. Ball quality… sure. Auto layout… sure. Wheel of Fortune… sure.
I also think the trench run concept is still key. There were lots of teams with design trade-offs around short vs. tall.