As mentioned in another thread, at FIM District St Joseph they asked the entire audience to remain silent during the match so that all we could hear were the robots running. It was really cool! The crowd did a great job of cooperating, too!
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It was very cool to hear the robots running. Almost creepy. 
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Love it at the end when the GA says “That was weird!” 
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That WAS weird! It almost felt like they were in slow motion. I assume the GA still had his mic on because I could almost hear the drive coaches in the background giving “time left” cues to their drivers. Really cool that they did this.
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They have one of these matches during every WVROX offseason. They even make the drive teams be quiet.
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They did this at FiM Wayne State too! It was one of the last qualification matches, and the crowd was amazingly silent until the endgame when one of the alliances pulled off a triple balance. It was pretty surreal.
Also, I’m shocked at how gentle and controlled the driving is in this match. Everyone at my event brought a fast robot and then drove it like they stole it.
Edit: it was qualification match #78, the last one. Unfortunately the webcast video didn’t get much of the actual room audio but it was pretty cool from down by the field.
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Hearing Aide manufacturers hate this!
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Same at Arkansas (much faster), but then the robots averaged considerably shorter than the ones at St. Joe.
I could be wrong, but the videos from St. Joseph appear to be distorted in a way that makes things appear slower than normal. 6002, featured in the video, was very fast in person.
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I’m curious how this affects the drivers. While not having a lot of noise could be good, when you’re used to the noise while driving, does it through you off? Make you feel like you’re in a practice match, not the real thing? I think it would throw me off subconsciously personally.
The team I mentor was in that match, 8126. 8126 was not the quickest robot on the field. However, 6002 is very fast and was ranked #1 during the qualification round. I think the fish-eye view distorts the speed.
It was difficult not cheer, I’m sure I cheered a little. I thought they were joking at first on requesting a quiet match but it was memorable.
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Coaching was super weird during the quiet match at Wayne State. I felt so strange just having a normal conversation with the drive team rather than feeling like I had to yell.
Our driver said it was weird, but he did seem to be able to focus a little better. It was way easier to have callouts for time remaining heard by everyone for sure. Overall, our team didn’t love it, but didn’t hate it either. It just felt less exciting, and I felt like I could hear every contact knocking our screws loose.
I walked in after the start of this match and I was beyond confused! Wondered if something bad had happened that caused everyone to be silent
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I desperately want a silent match with all the top robots
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Yeah, the randomly chosen qual match only had the 1 and 2 seeds in it. I don’t think cherry picking could have done much better. It would have been nice to have a match with high seeded teams on both sides, though.
Maybe play a special silent match with seeds 1 thru 6, right before alliance selection, just for fun?
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If not, hopefully Chezy?
I would expect the best experience would be all 6 robots of the top tier. Like if you had 118, 254, 1678, 4414, 2910, 1323 all on the field.
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THAT match would be fun to watch, and bear to scout.
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I’d be too awestruck to be able to scout
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This is cool AF.
Cool! Like a sound up lap for F1. This is neat!
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