After watching the Einstein Finals this year from Detroit and seeing 3357 be dead both matches, It seems like the Einstein Finals should be changed from a best of 3 to a best of 5 or 7. By making it a best of 7 (or 5) it can make the matches more exciting and add the possibility of seeing the greatest thing in sports “Game 7” The thing with doing this FIRST needs to speed up the time in between matches. This will make everything more exciting and competitive to watch so there will be less of a chance of a fluke match like 3357 dying both times.
I tend to agree with everything the op stated.
Einstein is the culmination of these team’s competition seasons. To have it represented in 2 (sometimes 3 matches) and interspersed with long cameos from the talking heads, seems a bit lackluster in my opinion.
Plus with more matches we have the opportunity to see strategies evolve instead of the “Run it again, it’ll work this time” mentality that has happened in the past.
Best of 5 but you need a two win lead to win. I think the finals are so Boreing and way to drawn out it’s like a 3 hour event with at most 3 matches. The finals should have more action with more matches.
I think it’s silly that during the finals we watched Dean shoot t-shirts into the crowd for longer than we watched FRC robots on the field. Short of moving the entire round robin, other options could include making the finals bo5/bo7or having 4 teams advance from the round robin. The whole thing felt like a lot of “hurry up and wait.”
I agree with all of OP’s points. I’m sure the wait time was a bit better for those attending Champs because they can dance and stuff, but from the livestream especially, it’s a painfully dull 2(or 3) hours for 2, possibly 3, matches. Especially coming out of a great series of round robin matches like at Detroit this year.
Another thing that might be nice is a practice match. That field has never been played on, and it has to work perfectly.
I enjoy watching the division matches from qualifications to finals. RSN dose a great job. With the ESPN style sports desk cutting to interesting matches it feels like a sporting event. I didn’t watch Einstein in Detroit and I am not sure if I will unless FIRST changes their approach. FIRST is trying to make a “show” out of the finals.
People don’t watch a season worth of football or get involved with youth leagues because of the Superbowl half time show.
Make it about the kids, make it about the robots, make it technical the people can handle it.
This is my Proposition…
I agree with this, having the top 4 move on, especially with the fact that 4 alliances had a 3-2 record. I don’t like automated tiebreakers determining championships
If they did this, I think they would have to bump up the number of divisions to at least 8. With 6 divisions, having 4 move on would leave the remaining 2 alliances very disheartened about a performance that, in reality, was very impressive.
However if they increased the number of divisions, they would likely switch back to a bracket-style tournament, as a round robin would take quite a while(however 4 alliances would still advance with 8 divisions).
Regardless of playoff style and how many finals matches there are, FIRST really needs to cut down the time between matches. I don’t think they need to RUSH it, but a bit quicker than an hour between matches
Especially when they’re based on an arbitrary part of the scoring.
Why wasn’t the first tiebreaker head-to-head matchups? Among just the 4 alliances who went 3-2 overall, Daly and Tesla each went 2-1, while Carson and Curie went 1-2.
And if you do go to a scoring-based tiebreaker, why climbing points? It’s just arbitrary, and puts a heavier emphasis on climbing. It leads to a different game, just like Einstein last year forced teams try to rack up points, and invalidated some strategies and some alliances.
Even if they are arbitrary (which I don’t think they are–climbing robots photograph well, so of course FIRST wants that on Einstein), they aren’t a surprise–they’ve been published for months. Want to make it to the big stage? Plan your build and draft accordingly.
I had a family event yesterday and listened to the audio-only feed of the Twitch stream in the car. FIRST does a good job of fleshing out the night with content. I wouldn’t be opposed to a best of 5 format, nor a head-to-head initial tiebreaker. But I can see why they chose those decisions.
It doesn’t matter whose fault this particular incident was. It’s downright embarrassing that this program so consistently has dead robots in what are supposed to be the most intense matches of the year. This finicky house-of-cards control system we all have to use, where any one of a few dozen points of failure can wreck a team’s chances, is fundamentally at fault here.
Yes, Einstein finals should go to five, and even should have a test match; we’re in the venue for hours with nothing else to do anyway. But the fundamental issue is it shouldn’t even be this normal for robots to die.
Is it that normal? I don’t recall seeing any dead or disconnected robots in any of the 10 quals matches my team played at Champs this year (on either side), or even during any elims matches I personally watched, or any other Einstein matches at Cobo.
We go to Ford Field on what is promoted to be a “brand new, pristine field”. Pristine to me means untested, and without a practice match or true evaluation of the RF environment, “meh” lighting conditions, and robots just unloaded from vans transported entirely across a city on bumpy roads, I was not surprised at all that at least one robot had an issue.
Just watched all of your matches on Twitch. Found the 3 quals matches you’re talking about, although they usually died over a minute into the match. Yeah that’s bad luck, but at least 2 seemed to come back after radio resets. Coincidentally all when you were on red alliance though.
I’m not sure how FIRST could make the control system significantly more reliable until the refresh in a few years. There are a few small things, like creating some kind of latch-in for RoboRIO/VRM fuses, or combining the main robot controller with the radio, but I don’t see those happening until the refresh. I think the biggest step forwards this year was putting POE cables in the KOP. Comms issues were at an all time low (in comparison to last year, where bots were dying every couple matches), we only ever had one or two robots on our alliance with comms issues across 67 matches this year. Our robot worked without comms issues all season until our final couple elims matches at worlds (ugh…) but that was just because of the 10A fuse on the PDP somehow worming its way a little bit loose.
I would say “house-of-cards” is a bit of an exaggeration, and I think there is only so much you can do to make the control system foolproof for high school teams. I think as-is, the control system is pretty solid from a reliability standpoint (if assembled correctly).
I was sad to see the Comets sit, they were an outstanding team to play against and with at St. Joe in Indiana. I never saw them get a chance to “test” field connections with their robots when they got there. You never know what’s going on in situations like that and it’s sad to see it.
One comment I had, was I wonder if FIRST would consider moving the round robin to Ford Field? It certainly would be more exciting for the teams that make it to Einstein to play on Ford Field instead of just the two “final” alliances. They all deserved a “Level-Up” and a new “World” to play in…
Plus there was not a seat left in the bleachers on Saturday to watch the round robin and there was way more space in Ford Field to see the finals this way.
Plus it would allow all the teams additional chances to work out any kinks in the field, meaning because they play the round robin on the field, robots have had a more of chance to connect and be running before you play the last two matches on a brand new field. Just my two cents.
