Now that week 1 is over. What are your thoughts on Charged Up now that we can actually see the game being played? Opinions on the new Double Elimination Playoffs, etc.
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Oh man I SLEPT on this game. Thoughts after watching ONT Georgian and Newmarket:
- Scoring demands a lot more accuracy than I expected.
- Teams that can consistently cycle, as usual, do well - see 2056, 1114 (shocker).
- There is a lot of open space, and it can get chaotic. Basically 2022’s openness on steroids.
- I don’t know how much higher the scoring ceiling can be pushed from here - see Newmarket F2,, the grid is 2/3 full for blue, and only the BOTTOM row is left. Super powerful alliance aside, I think we will definitely see some full grids, but I don’t think it’ll neccesarily become the status quo at worlds.
- The endgame, while being “mechanically” much easier than the past few years, can be INSANELY difficult to coordinate with your alliance. See Georgian F2’s endgame once the video is posted - red needed a triple balance, and they just barely couldn’t engage. This “low skill floor / high skill ceiling” is often perfectly designed in FRC imo, and it’s one of the best parts of the program.
- The endgame is very different from 2010 - balancing parallel to the axis of the charge station is a completely different ballgame compared to balancing 2 robots perpendicular on the bridges.
- The skill gap between 2-climbs and 3-climbs is wide. The size of the docking station is absolutely perfect to make this challenging.
I was not feeling too great about this game after the reveal, but it’s grown on me fast. While it’s not the biggest thematic hit, I think GDC nailed it overall.
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My 1st event, new mentor. Love the program and the game. I love the wide range of strategies different teams bring. Wish they had this when i was young. Can see myself doing this long after my last is gone. Best part is the helpful attitude of everyone I met, every team willing to help everyone else. The world needs more coopertition environments.
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This is awesome. Welcome to your new addiction!
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Thank You!
I expect my view of this game to evolve. The optimist in me says drive teams will drill, and pit crews will give them better functioning intake and placement mechanisms, so that cycle times for top-half teams at Week 4 events will look like those of top-three teams this week. When that happens, this game will be a lot more fun to watch. And more demanding to referee.
Timing is everything when this game plays fast. If you can maintain spacing from your alliance partners, you can dance around opponents in the open field without slowing down. But for that style to pay off, cycles must begin and end with dexterous intake and placement. It is a very good thing that we no longer have the bag for games like this one. Some DCMPs, Einstein, and IRI will show us what Charged Up can look like at ludicrous speed.
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I think that teams will fill up the grid by week 3 and then teams are going to have to get really good at defense and that will determine the good teams from the bad
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I’m with you, when it was first revealed I thought “interesting challenge, May not be that interesting to watch” but after this weekend at Newmarket I’m 100% turned around on it.
It’s ultimately fun to watch and gives every bot something to do regardless of capability.
It also felt like they could turn the fields over faster this year? Overall the whole event just felt snappier even compared to last year with the compressed 1-day events we were competing in.
Really like the double elimination change for playoffs too.
All in all bodes well for a good season.
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Good game, hard to watch online (as in the gamepieces scored on the grid).
The game seems pretty well balanced out of the box (pun intended). Endgame, auto and teleop seem correct to me in terms of proportion of points in quals and elims.
I don’t thing the GDC was expecting so many small robots.
Double elims /awards format is dope.
GDC needs to address the rulings around field faults and the charging station.
Similar thread here… maybe merge?
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It’s not any easier in person I found… but also found I wasn’t too concerned watching live except for a “did the place the piece or not?” - the scoreboard could tell you at a glance where a team was with links for tracking the RP.
My Attention was a lot more on watching alliance bits navigate the mayhem in the “X” between the grids and feeder stations.
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We can? The view of scoring is not so friendly to webcasts. Blue cubes blend into blue shelves. Poles are hard to see. Tough to easily determine what is being scored where.
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It’s particularly difficult when events choose extremely wide angle, far back views that have more of the screen taken up by the surrounding stadium than the field.
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The game is ok. It has its trickiness for designing a robot to do everything but is easy for a robot to do 1 thing good. The problem is It is hard to watch, especially on tv or YouTube replay. I had a friend and his son that have not been to an FRC event before and enjoyed it for the the most part but it was hard to follow the scoring and wasn’t as fun to watch as the videos from last year that he watched with his son. I know from the event we were at if you don’t get good seating its near impossible to determine who’s winning unless you just watch the score board.
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I think this game is super fun to play and watch. A lot more strategic nuance than last year. Because of the finite scoring opportunities all 3 robots on an alliance can have a niche to contribute to a grid.
2 gripes tho.
The endgame balance is too easy, everyone just kinda does it, so it’s not the wild card that it could be. I feel like a lot of the competitiveness at high levels will be triple balancing as late as possible.
(It would be super cool if they did a team update before worlds to allow multiple auto balances per alliance. Seeing 3 robots autonomously coordinate would be sick.)
The game is super hard to watch from anywhere except for directly perpendicular to the field - the grids kinda hide behind the driver stations.
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This game is decently more challenging and more exciting than I anticipated at kickoff.
The traffic jams actually help a lot with the second aspect, which is unusual. They resolve themselves fast enough to keep the game from becoming a slog, but are common enough to make it that much more appreciable when robots successfully maneuver around each other. It’s such a joy to watch good drivers this year.
It has just the right amount of precision imo - enough to regularly slow teams down a bit, but not enough that teams fail a placement several times in a row. The last thing we had like this were the gear pegs in 2017, which were just too demanding (and there was that whole flexing ordeal).
The charge station is also a nice element throughout teleop. It creates a fair amount of the aforementioned traffic jams, but can be traversed in a pinch by a good number of teams. That sort of soft barrier adds enough variation to keep things feeling fresh as you watch matches all day. While the endgame itself is indeed unusually easy, it’s leading to teams underestimating the time they need to coordinate. Every balance (in quals, anyway) is different, and attempts to push things late create chaos. The buzzer beater feel to late balances is really fun too.
Oh - allowing the endgame to be performed in auto is also great. That should happen more.
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I think the most confusing thing was (and I hope they fix it)…the “jumbotron” scoreboard. Blue was on the red side…and vice versa. At least that was how it was in Waco.
Other than that it was interesting compared to the last few years…
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That’s configurable in the scoreboard settings, and should hopefully be consistent at your future events.
I’ll echo the above comments about underestimating this game, I really enjoyed the game play at both mid and high level and am looking forward to seeing how it progresses.
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We do too. We are competing this weekend in Belton. Shall be fun and interesting!!!
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In terms of mechanism design, it is significantly easier than years past. However, in terms of execution difficulty, I’m not convinced it is much easier. Assuming all bots in question are mechanically capable, executing a triple balance seems comparable to double climbs/hab-3s in 2018 and 2019, respectivly. And the potential for catastrophic failure is at least as delectable as it is in any other year, even without the 3-foot falls.
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Just wait until teams are trying to go from no robots on the charge station to 3 robots balanced, all in the last 5 seconds of the match. This is plenty hard. There will be games of charge station chicken by the end of the season.
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