Starting from 2020 Chinese team lost FRC. We lost our FRC season. We don’t even have a single competition this year. In this March, the organizer told us we will have a delay FRC competition because of Covid. We totally understand it and wait for the message from CN FIRST. Until the end of September that we were notified again that the games originally scheduled for early September were cancelled again after being postponed to October(team want to take part in this game decrease from 42 at the begin of this season to 28 now). We can’t handle it anymore. During the whole year of this year, all the mentors and students have been preparing for the competition in a highly tense state, which cost a lot of money and energy. We don’t know if we can continue run the team next year without having any competition. Other competition such as VEX and other competition in China already hold serval times. Only FRC was left.
We don’t want to blame anyone. We know people who hold FRC in China try their best to make it possible(even they didn’t make it). But I highly suggest to have someone better to hold CN FIRST.
We are asking for help. Is it possible to let FIRST allow make our own competition without using FMS and asking permission from CNFRC(because anyone want to hold Off-season need to cooperate with CNFRC organizer which will need spend a lot money and make them quit) ? Or is any possible solution for us avoid it happen again?
Hope our senior student can have competition next year. All senior student in CN team lost their last year in FIRST. We don’t want it happen again.
Best.
Have the exact same feeling. At first I thought it’s just because of covid in China, but as right now, all other competitions are back on track and had several events already. I started to not understand why it’s so hard for us to get an event going.
In a vacuum, you can do this already. All you need is a wooden field and a few teams to meet, and you can do as many matches as time allows. Teams around the world do this already, often a team has a space for a half field and will let other teams do practice at their space. Its less common to see a full field, but even if its just some fun driving around, a half field sure beats nothing.
Theres even some open source, offseason only versions of the FMS created by teams if you really want to simulate a proper event, but this has caveats (discussed below).
Actually doing this is not as easy, you either need a large, centralized space for teams to easily get to (or money to rent one out) and the resources to make sure you can create said field and make sure its safe for people to use.
If you use the offseason FMS, you now also need all the personnel and equipment to run it. This is not cheap or easy to do, even in the US. At this point, you may as well spend the extra money to somehow get your own field, and you’re likely back talking to CNFIRST who has the resources to make that happen (and you’ll likely need to talk to anyways to find personnel for the more technical positions.)
Knowing very little about the situation in China, both in relation to competetive HS robotics and any situations regarding COVID or policies related to it, I cant reasonably talk to any other point in your post. I wish you the best of luck in getting some playtime in with your 2022 robots, and hopefully the regional listed for 2023 successfully runs.
But the problem is that we need a government permission to have a big (national-wide) event. It seems like only regional or local events are possible now.
Imagine a season that you have 4 months of total lockdown—mainly during school time, 6 months away from your lab and are forced to wander around the city to find a place to build your robot, under tightening COVID regulation policies, just for ONE SINGLE COMPETITION. And you are told that the competition is cancelled after 3 postponations. Yep.
Holding an FRC event is extremely hard in CN right now, mainly due to local policies.
The biggest concern is who is going to take the COVID responsibility—which is a hot potato no one wants to touch. FRC events usually requires gathering of people, which directly go against the COVID policy. You will have to pull strings to find the person or the organization who can handle all of these. Application to the government, through visible channels, will not work in most circumstances (as they are justified to turn down the proposal to prevent any COVID risk, especially for a high-school student event).
Even without the threat of COVID, holding competition is not easy and require pre-application as well, but it becomes possible for teams to hold events. All the other things, like the FMS and the Field, can be overcame through collective efforts—we have personnel and even plans to use off season FMS and Cheesy Arena.
The real thing we want from FIRST Headquarters is a powerful CN FIRST for acquiring approvals and holding competitions. This can be done by having more support to CN FIRST, who is mainly responsible for acquiring approvals through their efforts.
Moreover, it is important for CN FIRST to maintain the value of FRC, for example, Gracious Professionalism and the Exploration of Science. An over-commercialized FRC can attract enough companies and officials for support, yet it is not the event we want to have.
As a former member of FRC society and core partner (Event host,sponsor and media&press partner) of the local events, I would like to say that the regional director (For privacy i won’t name he or she specifically ) can’t control her/his emotion and take it personal. Finally under his/her dictation the event went South. As a partner we have already tried to satisfy all the reasonable requirements but still,the negotiation between Local host and CNFRC have broken down that we are really sorry .
It’s true that all China FRC teams want a competition, but I don’t think changing organizer is a solution. The organizers have worked hard and there’re things that can’t be controlled in our hands. FRC is different from VEX in terms of scale and form. We shouldn’t expect FRC to be exactly the same as VEX. All I can say is that it has been really tough for FRC teams in China due to its uniqueness.
CNFRC‘s leader stopped recent competition in China Nanjing city. She had an apparent conflict in public chatting group with regional sponsor that everyone enrolled in this regional competition could see it. I suppose this behavior is personal willingness. Thing that all the team members knew was the local sponsor had deal with all the covid-19 report with local sponsor. Hegemony behavior in FRC CHINA appeared several times. In 2022, we didn’t even had one competition in China and every teams had spend plenty of energy and money on machine. Now the results of the whole year is useless.
Be honest we haven’t notice or feel so called hardwork as strategy partner and co worker when corporate with the organizer, We only aware that some staff are individually trying to Push forward the process Like Mr.Bill chen, but as a whole ,for the organizer we only feel arrogance, that they claim they R representing the FIRST_US/HQ so they have full right on every single part of the game including the part that not in the official’s protocol.
Even the event in Nanjing has fallen we appreciate Director Bill Chen and Shifei Yin and all their efforts
One of the main director rather sacrifice all the effort that the teams,his/her colleagues,parnters,local host have made ,to ensure ‘Her words count and follow her so called principles’ ,and 100% control of CN domestic FRC ecosystem.
Personally joke lol : if it wasn’t for i have acknowledged that 2022 FRC topic is Rapid react,I might thought 2022 topic is “Game of Thrones”
"Khaleesi has back to Westeros " LMAO
We’ve been there (in 2020). It was really frustrating, and we lost a lot of student-continuity. I’m sorry to hear you are still going through such difficulties. Hopefully you are able to find some use for your robot in 2022, and if not, I hope 2023 returns to a normal season for you.