Silly Lacsap, don’t you know how much longer this would take !!! An extra 15 seconds for an average of 70 matches at a regional would add a whole 17.5 minutes to the tournament !!! How will the EPs survive ??? We can’t just go around adding a few minutes to tournaments to make the experience better for competitors like that !!!
Yes Ben, I agree with you. We should only use BO1 to save time at tournaments. BO3 should be gone for good! Great thinking!
I mean, it’s just 17 more minutes. Also, you sounded kind of abrasive there.
He’s being sarcastic. He’s trying to show why they should bring BO3 back.
Haha yeah I’m totally meming- a 30 second auton would be awesome. I’m just trying to show how silly it is to say something saves a few minutes at a tournament so it’s automatically a good idea even if it hurts the quality of the tournament.
Can we get a full breakdown of the objective, quantifiable metrics you are using to judge the quality of tournaments, and their relative weighting of importance?
My prediction is that next year’s game will have some form of irregular game component. From what I’ve seen VEX seems to alternate between balls and assorted game pieces.
oh wow, sorry my dude. I feel like a jerk. Next time I’ll think before I type.
I’m not sure if I can give a satisfactory “full breakdown” but I’ll give it my best shot.
Objective: Create a fun tournament for competitors, volunteers, and parent spectators.
Metrics:
For competitors: interesting engineering challenges, fairness, fun games to drive, respect from volunteers
For volunteers: low stress, short tournaments, easy field setup (both setting up the field at the beginning of the day and resetting the field after each match), respect from competitors and parent spectators
For parent spectators: low stress, short tournaments, fairness for their kids, overall respect and good atmosphere
For an interesting engineering challenge, an unusual task facilitates innovation. Games like Skyrise forced us to innovate solutions to new and more advanced engineering problems. V5 is also a huge step in encouraging good engineering because fewer, more powerful motors make systems like double ratchets and transmissions both viable (the motors don’t stall) and necessary (with only 2-4 motors not on the chassis, motors often need to do more than 1 thing.)
Game like TP don’t require good engineering to nearly the same extent because there’s so much defense that simply pushing your opponent most of the match is a viable strategy. In the National Finals, 3 of the 4 robots didn’t even have a double shot, but they managed to get to finals because of amazing driving and match strategy.
For fairness, bo3 goes a long way. Eliminating game design elements like pinning and trapping, which are difficult to call and often are called radically differently depending on the specific ref, and inconsistencies between practice fields and actual fields, such as variable flag stiffness, also increase fairness. And more reliable hardware and software are huge as well. When your brain white screens or your brain port dies for no reason in the middle of a match, it detracts from the fairness of the tournament. And finally, having better trained refs makes events more fair, though of course it’s difficult to make this happen at local tournaments for a reasonable price.
For fun while driving, it’s obviously super subjective, but I’ve always found more multifaceted robots more fun to drive. In games like NBN, where it’s strategic for a robot to sit still and shoot the same shot 24 times, driving is incredibly boring. But the fast paced race for field balls I found to be really fun. There also needs to be a balance of offense and defense. In skyrise, a game with almost no defense whatsoever, driving was really repetitive, but in TP, a game with the heaviest defense we’ve ever seen, it can be frustrating to just be defended all match. NBN (at least while outfielding) and SS, while overall pretty poor games IMO, were really fun to drive because they were largely but not entirely offensive and the robots were always in action.
For volunteers, stress often comes from time pressure and software problems. Tournament Manager needs to be fixed, and competitors need to get to matches on time. Bo3 also helps because there’s less pressure on refs to make the perfect call every time.
To keep the tournaments short, a lot of the ceremony could be eliminated. A lot of the speeches at worlds, handing out awards between every elimination round instead of just all together at the end, etc. helps with time. Bo1 also saves time, but only with an 8 or 12 team bracket. And games where auton can be counted easily help as well. In NBN and ITZ, it was incredibly easy to count up the points and see who had won auton. By contrast, back and forth games like TP and SS require basically every game object to be counted to arrive at a score, which slows down the time between auton and driver control.
For easy setup, game pieces should be easy to balance firmly and there should be no net. The two most torturous field elements to assemble in my vex career were the goals in NBN and the net this year. Hard pieces like the 10 and 20 point bars in ITZ and the goals in TU were annoying to set up, but they didn’t take nearly as much time. And for match setup, the pieces should rest firmly in their positions. ITZ cones and Skyrise cubes did this really well, while TP platform balls and NBN ball pyramids (the setup with 3 green balls in a triangle and the orange ball on top) do not.
The last goal, respect, is a mutual goal between all 3 groups and it’s one of the most important aspects of a healthy competition. The RECF code of conduct and G1 are great (though they way they’re used isn’t always great), but as per the game design, making clear rules that are easy for refs to enforce is really the only way the game design can help facilitate respect. If refs are making a lot of controversial calls because the rule is unclear, students will argue with the refs, parents will second guess them, and it creates hard feelings. Obviously this is not how it should be, but empirically it is.
To make more easily enforceable rules, the GDC needs to think through the things a ref can reasonably be expected to identify or count in a match. For example, if 2 robots tip each other over and the ref is forced to guess the intent of the offending robot based on a short interaction, or if they are forced to start a trapping count exactly when the trap starts knowing that any of the 4 robots on the field could initiate a trap at any time, it puts lots of pressure on everyone. If more rematches were mandated in close calls, if some of these hard-to-enforce rules were reworked to be easier on the refs, or if video replays became legal, pressure would be taken off the refs, and their calls could be made with more authority and certainty.
Now, it’s hard for me to assign a numerical weight to these aspects. I feel they are all paramount to having a successful tournament, and for the most part, the huge majority of them are upheld at vex tournaments. But here are a lot of suggestions for the GDC when they’re designing games to make the season more successful.
I genuinely believe the design of TP, between the unenforcibility of pinning rules because defense is so prevalent, the difficulty of counting auton which can cause rushed (and sometimes wrong) calls, bo1, and the difficulty of assembling TP (leading to stressed out event staff) fields has tangibly harmed many teams’ seasons this year. For example, the 448X controversy began as a dispute over a pinning call, in which the ref was forced to make an incredibly difficult judgement call in a borderline interaction with no replay and in a bo1 state finals match. Similarly, much of the frustration stemming from US Open can directly be tied to reffing and variable flag stiffness concerns, and of course bo1.
Now with regards to bo1, I’ve already proposed a compromise that, for the most part, gives each group what they want. At local tournaments, the brackets are pure bo1 with a bo3 finals, and at states, nationals, and worlds, the brackets are pure bo3. This compromise has been endorsed on discord by @OscarMNOVA12 and @TheColdedge, two EPs who have historically defended bo1, and it seems to have overwhelming competitor support. I’m not going to assign each personal value a numerical value and give you the matrix output that supports my compromise, but it seems like a genuinely easy and fair compromise that gives everyone almost all of what they want, almost all of the time.
And of course, all the other values I’ve detailed will hopefully help the GDC when they’re thinking about game design. The bo1 debate has dominated the forums over the last year, but it is far from the only aspect of competitions that make them good or bad.
And no worries, there was a lot of context you were missing 
You didn’t come off as a jerk.
Why must you drag me into this? I’ve been off the forum for over a week. Have you missed me?
@Anomaly for GDC! 
And @Anomaly. I have zero problems with that.
If Anomaly was on the GDC, I would get G1ed faster than V5 ships
We always miss you when you’re not around for such a long period of time!
Yet more context needed. sigh
You don’t need the context
No, I don’t. But others will to understand the joke. Or we can just let it die and forget it happened…?
The ladder
“Latter going for 200, did I hear a latter for 200.”
Yea a ladder would be a fun thing to try and climb rather than straight up hanging.