I had a competition a little bit ago where they were enforcing the rules wrong. I was wondering how i would handle this. If you were wondering, they said that robots were not allowed to cross the plane of the other tape instead of not being allowed to touch the tape or tiles beyond.
Your only course of action last resort (that will actually do anything) is to record the guy doing this wrong, get his full name, upload the video to YouTube and then make a post about it here asking for action, with the linked video, respectfully as possible.
VEX will silently react and hopefully the problem gets resolved before the next event the guy ends up at.
You MIGHT get a reply from Karthik on the post here letting you know that something has been done.
AFTER someone official makes it clear that something has been done, out of respect I’d pull down the video and call it a day.
They (Paul, Jason, JVN, the owners, Karthik to some degree, etc.) hate me for saying these kind of things because it exposes a sort of oddly vulnerable side of VEX that they can’t do much about. The higher ups regularly refuse to admit or acknowledge that such a thing can happen, but actually do care enough about the integrity of the game that they will actually do something if proof exists.
Good luck!
MODS if you remove this post, I’ll absolutely make a video about it and the universe will die of heat death before I pull it down.
I cant show them the rule book or something?
I assumed you already did. Of course show them the manual. This is the next step past that, what to do if they refuse to change their ways of making calls.
Ok thanks cody!
Yep, first step is to show them the manual or official Q&A post from Karthik. That usually does the trick.
Cody’s course of action is the extreme, after you’ve lost the ruling (and presumably the match). First show the “bad referee” the rulebook/Q&A. If that doesn’t work, talk to the head ref. If that doesn’t work, talk to the RECF rep if there’s one at your tournament. If that all fails, and the bad call was extremely significant, repeated or blatantly unfair, then follow Cody’s course of action. But if a ref makes one bad call, that’s (usually) hardly reason to get Karthik involved.
I wholeheartedly agree with this.
However, in my defense, he did say the event was already over. In that situation many of those 100% valid options are off the table, for the simple reason that the event is over and everyone has gone home,
It is a difficult thing for VEX to handle. They have to design new games every year that make it a compelling reason to get involved, complex enough to keep the current teams, and simple enough for volunteers to ref that may have never seen the game before. If a local ref at your event did not call something correctly, I feel that is more of a system failure.
The training videos are very helpful to help run events, as laypeople will have no idea what to do even after reading just the rules. They were released about a week ago, but they NEED to be released within a month of the game itself. I run a few events and they are tough to run accurately. I have some very good people but it’s just a tough task that they are doing. Also, do you rerun matches or just stay consistent?
VEX and the REC foundation have an almost impossible task before them every year. You just have to be able to adapt as local events are still going to have trouble keeping things straight. Don’t let it ruin your day. There is nothing that they can do after the fact, as they are not going to invalidate a tournament, and that’s all they really could do once it is over.
lol