The Dead Ball Debacle

Competition Rules/Strategy
1

Dead balls are an issue that have presented themselves in this game, and I’m surprised by the lack of discussion about it.

3.1.2 MATCH Logistics
If an ALLIANCE’S BALL becomes stuck in an ALLIANCE’S ROBOT, the ALLIANCE may signal to the Head Referee that the BALL is “dead” by holding the yellow “DEAD BALL” placard against the DRIVER STATION acrylic. At this point, the Head Referee will suspend the CYCLE (TRUSS and CATCH points are maintained, ASSIST accruals are voided) and re-illuminate the PEDESTAL, beginning another CYCLE for that ALLIANCE. If the ALLIANCE has not yet begun a CYCLE, the Head Ref will illuminate the PEDESTAL to begin the first CYCLE for that ALLIANCE once the dead BALL is the ALLIANCE’S only BALL on the FIELD that has not been SCORED. If the dead BALL is freed, that BALL must be removed from the FIELD through one of the ALLIANCE’S GOALS or by passing to an ALLIANCE HUMAN PLAYER. The ALLIANCE may continue to earn POSSESSIONS, ASSISTS, TRUSS and CATCH points with the live BALL but will not be credited for a SCORED GOAL with the live BALL (though if the BALL otherwise meets the definition of SCORED it will be handled as SCORED by FIELD crew) until the dead BALL is removed from the FIELD. Consequently, the ALLIANCE will not begin a new CYCLE until the freed dead BALL is removed from the FIELD. Each ALLIANCE is allowed to indicate one (1) BALL as “dead” per MATCH.

Lets break it up.

The Head Ref will illuminate the PEDESTAL to begin the first CYCLE for that ALLIANCE once the dead BALL is the ALLIANCE’S only BALL on the FIELD that has not been SCORED.

Similar to “traditional” pedestal issues, the head referee isn’t always quick at relighting the pedestal. (However the head referee at Howell was very good at this.) This generally causes match delays, however it’s not that significant.

What happens when both alliances call a dead ball at the same time? The head referee is bound to notice one before the other, which will result in one pedestal being illuminated before the other. Again, a fairly minor issue, unless it’s in the closing seconds of the match.

If the dead BALL is freed, that BALL must be removed from the FIELD through one of the ALLIANCE’S GOALS or by passing to an ALLIANCE HUMAN PLAYER.

What exactly is the human player supposed to do with the dead ball in the event the ball is passed to them?

The ALLIANCE may continue to earn POSSESSIONS, ASSISTS, TRUSS and CATCH points with the live BALL but will not be credited for a SCORED GOAL with the live BALL (though if the BALL otherwise meets the definition of SCORED it will be handled as SCORED by FIELD crew) until the dead BALL is removed from the FIELD.

How exactly are the referees supposed to keep track of which ball is dead and which ball is live, when it’s hard enough to tell the difference between different coloured balls when there 4 robots and 2 balls all together bashing into each other (see 2:26 of this video.)

And now for my favourite one…

Each ALLIANCE is allowed to indicate one (1) BALL as “dead” per MATCH.

Why? What strategic advantages do teams have for calling multiple dead balls? If I have 2 alliance partners who both die in autonomous, I literally cannot score anymore points, other than drawing fouls (everyone’s favourite, right?). How would you feel if this specific event were to happen in on Einstein final match 3?

The major issue with dead balls is the GDC’s apparent lack of foresight in seeing them! The dead ball update didn’t come until 6 days after kickoff. Why was this not in the original set of rules? Teams picked up on this within hours of the manual being released.

2

Gregor,

I can guess at two reasons that each Alliance is limited to declaring a single dead ball.

1: Lets take your first point. Can you imagine a game where there are three dead balls for blue on the field. If you’ve seen a game where the dead ball came free you know the chaos that can ensue. Any chance that the teams or refs could keep track would be very limited with more than 1 dead ball per alliance. As you say, it was hard enough for the ref to watch his particular corner and the rest of the field. If he missed where the balls changed position, he’d never know which one to score and which ones to ignore. Limiting teams to 1 dead ball each at least provided a chance that the refs could keep track.

  1. Now for the strategic advantage of declaring a dead ball. At the New York Tech Valley Regional I watched a number of games where dead balls were declared. On two occasions a few of us noted that a team declared their ball dead once a defense had them cornered (not pinned). They could not escape, so they quickly declared the ball dead. This allowed their team to reintroduce a new ball and thus a chance of continued scoring. Obviously this is a strategic advantage. Allowing this to happen more than once would essentially just shut down the defensive side of the game. Any team could declare their ball dead, let a new one come onto the field and then toss their ball from the field to free up their robot to receive the new live ball.

I didn’t notice anything in the rules that doesn’t allow this action either.

-Bernie

3

I’ll go through all your points and address them to clear anything up and make it easy on drive teams.

Similar to “traditional” pedestal issues, the head referee isn’t always quick at relighting the pedestal. (However the head referee at Howell was very good at this.) This generally causes match delays, however it’s not that significant.

It is the drive team’s responsibility to make sure the head referee knows they want to call a dead ball. Holding up the sign by itself won’t work. You need to pound on the glass and have someone run to the nearest referee to get their attention. This is what I instructed teams to do in during the drivers meeting, and it worked really well. Generally pounding on the glass was enough for me to notice. If you just hold up the sign, you can only blame yourself for it taking a while for the pedestal to light up.

Also keep in mind that it is your responsibility to call for a dead ball, not the head ref’s. So don’t get mad when a dead robot has a ball trapped and a dead ball isn’t being called while you aren’t holding up the sign.

What happens when both alliances call a dead ball at the same time? The head referee is bound to notice one before the other, which will result in one pedestal being illuminated before the other. Again, a fairly minor issue, unless it’s in the closing seconds of the match.

In almost 130 matches at GKC, there were probably less than 10 dead ball signals. I highly doubt you’ll ever run into a situation where both alliances want to call a dead ball. But like I said earlier, if it does happen, pound on the glass to get the head ref’s attention while holding up the sign.

What exactly is the human player supposed to do with the dead ball in the event the ball is passed to them?

Give it to field reset. They will take it back to behind your driver station.

How exactly are the referees supposed to keep track of which ball is dead and which ball is live, when it’s hard enough to tell the difference between different coloured balls when there 4 robots and 2 balls all together bashing into each other (see 2:26 of this video.)

I think you’ll find that for Week 4 regionals on, there will be 2 refs dedicated to watching the balls for possessions and scoring. With that, it’s fairly easy to keep track of which ball is dead and which is live. The head ref is also watching and helps point out which is dead and not to score it.

Why? What strategic advantages do teams have for calling multiple dead balls? If I have 2 alliance partners who both die in autonomous, I literally cannot score anymore points, other than drawing fouls (everyone’s favourite, right?). How would you feel if this specific event were to happen in on Einstein final match 3?

You just said that it is difficult to keep track of 2 balls on the court already, why do you want to add more? I think this was done mainly to keep the arena clear and help out refs, but that’s all I can think of.

The major issue with dead balls is the GDC’s apparent lack of foresight in seeing them! The dead ball update didn’t come until 6 days after kickoff. Why was this not in the original set of rules? Teams picked up on this within hours of the manual being released.

Would you rather have this information added after week 1 or 2 of regionals, like G26-1 and the changes to G40? It’s easy to complain now, but just think how much bigger of an “issue” this would have been if it would have been added after competitions started.

4

You should check and see how it was actually scored. The rules do state that if a ball is declared dead and later becomes loose on the field (as would happen in your scenario), the dead ball MUST be put through a goal (for no points) before the new ball can be scored. This should make it strategically disadvantageous in almost every scenario to declare a dead ball like that.

But it does bring up a good point…does the referee have to recognized the dead ball card WHENEVER it is presented, regardless of if a ball is actually stuck or not?

Furthermore, a situation I have seen a lot is when an alliance gets the opponents ball stuck in their robot accidentally. If the red robot had a blue ball land in their robot, and red robot doesn’t have a working mechanism and cannot get the ball out, which alliance is supposed to declare the dead ball? Blue’s ball is “dead”, but it’s in the red robot.

Now if red’s robot DOES work, but they’re confused and don’t know if they should eject it or not, and the ball is declared dead, it is a strategic advantage for red to the eject blue’s ball. Blue has a new ball on the field already, but now they’re forced to go score the dead ball that just got put back into play by the red robot. Oops.

I’ve seen this happen at least 3 times so far in matches that I’ve watched. The result is generally absolute chaos and pandemonium, and usually results in a replay because nobody has clear direction on what to do.

Red already got the tech foul for accidental posession, so they have no incentive to eject it until the ball is either declared dead, or they think they’ll be assessed a 2nd tech foul for prolonged violation. If you’ve already got the tech foul, might as well delay your opponents a bit. If the ball was declared dead immediately, you get to play havoc with their strategy, and maybe even prevent them from getting to score the new ball!

Disclaimer: The above strategy is not what I would consider GP, but it is a valid play that is not addressed by the current rules.

Note that this situation (at least the intentional part) is remedied by making it a regular foul (or no foul) for incidental posession of an opponent’s ball if you get rid of it immediately (eg within 5 seconds or so). That encourages teams to get rid of the ball ASAP, because they haven’t gotten the tech foul yet but it is imminent.

5

At our regional the robot that declared the ball “dead” when they were essentially cornered did not release the ball after.

We notice however that the one match where the dead ball did become free the field crew handled the scoring. The live ball was put into scoring (low goal) and the head ref told the corner ref not to score. Then the team had to go get the dead ball and remove it from the field. At which time they gave the scoring of the live ball (which was scored 10 seconds earlier). In our case they sent it through the low goal, but that is not required per 3.1.2

3.1.2 …The ALLIANCE may continue to earn POSSESSIONS, ASSISTS, TRUSS and CATCH points with the live BALL but will not be credited for a SCORED GOAL with the live BALL (though if the BALL otherwise meets the definition of SCORED it will be handled as SCORED by FIELD crew) until the dead BALL is removed from the FIELD.

6

You can also pass to a human player on your alliance.

If the dead BALL is freed, that BALL must be removed from the FIELD through one of the ALLIANCE’S GOALS or by passing to an ALLIANCE HUMAN PLAYER.

7

From the rulebook 3.1.2
If an ALLIANCE’S BALL becomes stuck in an opposing ALLIANCE’S ROBOT, the Head Referee will signal an extended infraction of G12 (the assumption is that the ALLIANCE has already been penalized for the initial G12 infraction). At this point, the Head Referee will suspend the current CYCLE and re-illuminate the PEDESTAL, beginning another CYCLE for that ALLIANCE. If the stuck BALL is freed, that ball will be considered FIELD debris.

I agree with your assessment in that if a team gets an opposing team’s ball on them they will be assessed a G12, and if they keep it for some period (Ref’s interpretation) they will be assessed a second G12. At that time the ref declares introduces a new CYCLE. He does not declare the ball dead because a dead ball comes with more restrictions (having to clear it before scoring). Its essentially FIELD debris at this point, or the point in which it becomes clear of the robot.

To back up the OP, this would cause even more chaos. After clearing auton balls, Red could essentially have 3 balls on the field. Dead, debris, live. It’s even worse if you consider opponents picking up loose Auton balls before they are scored.

As a team that had an opponents ball pushed onto us, I think this approach would have been better. Get a foul for possession, have the 5 second count (much like they do with a pin) to clear it or receive a Tech Foul. When this happened to another team at Tech Valley and they questioned it, they were told it was not against the rules to force the ball into your opponent. I don’t understand why that doesn’t violate G14 however.

G14
Strategies aimed solely at forcing the opposing ALLIANCE to violate a rule are not in the spirit of FRC and are not allowed. Rule violations forced in this manner will not result in assessment of a penalty on the target ALLIANCE.

Violation: TECHNICAL FOUL

8

Match 26 at Central Valley had to be replayed because a dead ball scenario where it got freed, and there was confusion as to what to do with it and when a new ball should be introduced.

9

Imagine you could have infinite dead balls, and infinite balls could be introduced into play.

Inbound -> Truss+attempt at catch or shot towards low goal -> Instant dead ball

This means on robot can then move the dead ball off the field without fear of being suppressed or disrupted because a dead ball is not a priority target. I even saw some robots truss and the ball bounced into the low goal if that ball is considered dead before it goes through the goal it doesn’t need to be thrown back into play.
Truss and catch is awarded the second its done and dead ball resets the cycle anyway.

10

At the very least, the inability for an alliance to declare a dead-ball when one is stuck within an opposing robot should be resolved. Either by allowing a “dead ball” to be declared in any robot, or by rendering a ball dead when prolonged possession by an opposing alliance has occurred.

Personally, I believe the initial possession should be limited to a foul , prolonged (5sec) possession should yield an additional technical foul and immediately declare the ball field debris (same handling as a popped ball).

See this:

Our (blue) robot has the Red ball bounce into our mechanism at 1:37 video time, our drivers are trying to clear the ball for the remainder of the match (the prolonged possession was not intentional, the drivers overlooked an easy solution of reversing the collector, and we struggled to load the over-inflated ball into our shooter).

Eventually (at 2:00 video time) the head ref signals for a new red ball to be put into play, however they fail to score the ball, and our alliance manages to overcome the 100pt penalty by just 2 points.

11

The field people don’t really seem to know what to do when there is a dead ball card. In this video, you can see the yellow card raised at 42 seconds in, but no ball is inbounded until 20 seconds after.

12

Its a yellow card put up against the driver station…
Its not exactly the most eye catching thing.
A flare would have been better or something I dunno.

13

I can here the kids screaming dead ball in the video, the announcer announces there is a dead ball, and there is a crowd of three people staring at the dead robot. They know it’s a dead ball.

14

This is one of the few scenarios that I could see the declaration of a dead ball being advantageous, but even still, I doubt it would provide any real advantage when you consider that: a) it takes a significant amount of time for a dead ball request to be processed, b) multiple dead balls means that no ball can be scored in a goal until all are cleared, reducing scoring potential to 20 pts per ball (10 for truss, 10 for catch), c) there are typically only ~5 balls of each color available in a given match, d) a ball is required to be stuck to be declared dead.

Additionally, any rules change that allows additional dead-balls in play can also add a limit of 3 balls on the field at a given time, or simply penalize strategies aimed at exploiting the use of the dead-ball card (which would be glaringly obvious).

15

Doesn’t matter who is saying dead ball what matters is that someone holds up the yellow sign. The announcer doesn’t decide the ball is dead, the crowd doesn’t, the alliance makes the call. The alliance shows its call by putting up the sign. How do you know the kids screaming dead ball aren’t screaming dead ball for the other team? If it was determined by anybody saying it you could yell dead ball in a losing match and force a replay.

16

Just scoring normally is likely a better point value per time cycle.

Also, NO WAY teams will just let you get that ball of the field. Defenders will see offensive robots, and a ball. They will play defense. I don’t see why they would stop because they know it’s a dead ball. You can’t play the match until that ball is gone, so they will be on it.

17

Take your pick a dead ball being moved off the field or a robot setting up for a 2 assist high goal.
Which way do you send the defense?
Do you stop the ball that is worth nothing or the ball that has 2 assists on it?

18

Unless they only want to do one cycle, at some point that dead ball has to come off once it has come loose.

19

The concept would be to call a live ball in a robot dead to get the heat off the robot and start the next cycle.

20

This needs to be clarified universally. At Clifton (which I was reffing), teams were informed they were not allowed to bang on the glass. Something about part of it being held together by zip ties and not to over-test it for safety reasons. Even so, most delays were not in recognition (plus, there were those teams that ignored this warning) but in logistics of execution.

I’m no fan of the dead ball situation, but I dislike it principally within a game I’m not fan of, which was never going to be played the way the GDC envisioned it. Certainly the current method is better than the nightmares of stuck and irreplaceable balls that were among my first visions (“this is a terrible idea”, “why would I ref this?” and “welcome, 2007 destruction and penalty cornucopia”) directly after the kickoff video.

I’ve Q&A’d whether the head ref can deny a correctly signaled (first request) dead ball–i.e. can an alliance “dead” a ball for strategic reasons besides a physical inability to free it. Q457.