Hi all. Just a friendly note to be vigilant at the various Ben Lipper events in Southern California. We attended our first one today and it was rough.
it started 90 minutes late
they published at least 5 match line-ups with different teams each time
there was one ref for the two skills fields with no reset help (thus it was sloooow)
1/2 a table provided per team; no power strips
one team was supposed to alliance after lunch and they shifted them up to before lunch - a full hour early with no warning. Robots weren’t ready and it was a mess
skills scoring was not properly reflected
Matches did move quickly once underway and it ended up ok. Just made for way more stressful of an experience than it should have been.
If attending just make sure to be checking the app a ton for schedule changes; re-count your alliance scores to make sure you agree; bring your own field (no provided practice fields)
Welcome to the Forum!! I can’t comment on Ben’s events, I wasn’t there. But I’ve been to events that have been much more of a mess. Your comment about 5 match lineups happen when teams don’t show, can’t pass inspection. I held an event, published the schedule and was ready to play the first match. My co-EP said "Heads up, team nnnnA just packed up and left. " This would have caused 9 qualification matches of 1v2, not fair to 9 teams. So we stopped, explained, rescheduled and started over. We started an hour late, but finished only 10 mins late. Stuff happens.
The best thing you can do is contact Ben and go "Hey, your last event was a mess. I have two other people and the three of us will offer to be volunteers at event “xyzzy”.
For example it sounds like had Ben had an extra person (you?) at the skills field to reset, things would have moved along. TM is on of the easiest programs to learn how to run, skills could have been entered quickly by another volunteer.
I wrote this back in 2019 Justice in the RECF. Thank you for your time Dan - #8 by Foster
and it’s valid today. Events are run by volunteers, the more that help the better the events are. RECF tries to instill a sense of teamwork with the roboteers. I think that it’s also important to have a sense of community between the teams and the adults.
Sorry that you had a bad experience, but you can help make the next event better.
I was the TM for this event and one of the emcees.
I am sorry you didn’t enjoy the event. It was not our intention for any of these things to happen, but unexpected things happen. We’ve run upwards of 10 events, and while this one wasn’t our smoothest, it’s not uncommon to have events not go to plan perfectly on schedule. In case you wanted some behind the scenes on what was going on:
We had a team (who was present) drop out as we were passing out the match schedules. That’s why we had to collect them and regenerate and re-print them all. The first time we regenerated, I did it wrong (I only gave teams 5 qual matches), causing a 2-minute delay as we redid it. I am sorry that you thought the match schedule that was online for 2 minutes and not passed out to anyone was the official one. As the TM, I will tell you that it was not 5 different match schedules, it was 3. This is partly why the event started late. We were also still getting all the teams inspected. There was one team who wasn’t within the size requirements, so we were helping them so they could compete.
This wasn’t the intent. Most of our volunteers didn’t show up, so we were trying the best we could do with what we had. It’s not unusual to have have the volunteers not show up, but we were expecting 12+ and ended up with 3. One for the skills fields, one for competition field reset, and one referee. For reference, many events will have the teams reset the main fields as well.
Please show me where in the rules this is illegal. I understand that it is nice to have a full table and power strips, but as you were probably aware, we didn’t have a lot of extra space, so 1 table per team would not have fit in the room. There were outlets around the perimeter of the room you could use. Most events won’t provide you with power strips.
This is not just the case with our event. Most events do not stay perfectly on schedule, and will stop for lunch when it’s lunch time, not when the schedule says we should stop. Because of this, you should never go off of the times on the schedule to know when your match will be. Go off of what match is currently playing. We were running early, so we continued past when the schedule said to break for lunch before we actually stopped. It’s your responsibility to make sure you are at your matches, ready and on-time.
I am sorry if this was the case. If you see that your skills score wasn’t properly reflected, please bring it up with one of the event staff, ad they will direct it to the right person. We did have TM crash in the middle of the tournament, so if you were doing skills at that time, there is a possibility it could have gotten messed up. We did screenshot all of the scores for current matches going on when it crashed, but it is possible we made a mistake.
The schedule we pass out will be the correct version, and you should go off of that unless we say otherwise (like this event, where we re-collected them all). A few minutes after the schedule is passed out, there is pretty much a 0% chance it will change. In the future we will not publish the schedule to the app until we are sure it is correct, and hopefully this will help with this issue.
You should always be doing this anyway, at any event. The rules say that the referees must check the scores with the teams before submitting them.
While some events do, many events won’t provide practice fields. We considered having one, but we figured the teams would rather two skills fields over one skills and one practice field.
Hopefully this clears things up a little bit. And if you really didn’t like the event, there are lots of other events in Region 4 in LA, so feel free to sign up for one of those.
@FRC973 Thanks for the detailed response. All of the things you mentioned have happened to me before. The worst is when you are expecting volunteers and people bail on you. I have gone into the stands, asked an adult if they are a HS graduate and can count to 20 and have turned them into scorekeepers. Reset people are next on the list, I try to get siblings to help, the like being close to the action and gives them something to do.
And applause for you and your team; with a late start AND lack of staff AND a TM crash you caught up by lunch and were even ahead of schedule at one point. As a long term EP it’s pretty cool when you have all these disasters and yet awards get handed out on time.
@SocalRobot for IQ events we don’t supply power strips at the tables. We build charging tables with enough strips on them to allow each team to plug 2-3 devices in (ie a controller and battery packs) and remind teams to make sure their gear is marked.
Not sure of what the table seating was. We normally allocate 5 seats per team (4 roboteers and a mentor). Since 90% of my events are in cafeterias, that means 1/2 of a cafeteria table. The other event (64 teams) has 8’ tables with 4 chairs on each side and one on the end, that gives teams about a 4’ area to work in.
But please take my suggestion, reach out to Ben and offer to work his next event. As you saw, extra people do make a difference.
I think the rest of your response was totally fair, and I’ve certainly helped at events with those kind of issues, but I don’t agree with this. My understanding of standard practice, and certainly standard practice at every event I’ve been at, is that if we’re running super ahead matches might start 15 minutes early, or if we’re running really late we might push a few matches to after lunch so the volunteers can get some lunch, but I’ve never seen an event move matches scheduled after lunch to before lunch.
Sure it’s the responsibility of the team to show up to matches “on time” but I don’t consider showing up an hour earlier than the schedule says “on time.” A responsible team with a match after lunch will start heading out to lunch a bit early to make sure they have time to get lunch and get back in time for their match, especially if they may also want to get some skills runs in during lunch or something.
If their match is actually going to be before lunch, it’s not the team’s responsibility to be psychic and guess what match you’re actually going to run until, it’s the responsibility of the event to clearly communicate to teams that there will be a large deviation from the schedule you provided, and then give them some leeway as they get ready on the field because you’re already well ahead of schedule anyway.
Please make sure that TM issues like this get reported to us so we can investigate (this is the first we’ve heard of it for your event), preferably by posting in the Event Partners forum.
In this case, we examined the log files for the event and found that the TM server encountered disk I/O errors around 4pm, during match 116, and it looks like one skills match was not able to be saved because of the errors. The tournament file was stored on the G: drive, and it seems like the most likely explanation is that the G: drive was either a USB drive or a network share and it became disconnected, leading to the errors.
Tournament files should always be stored on the local hard drive of the computer running the TM Server to avoid any potential issues with USB or network connections.
We had it crash the first time just before matches were scheduled to start (around 10am), but at this point it was being stored locally on the computer. But because we stored the backup on a flash drive, we opened the tournament from there by accident. That’s why it was running from a flash drive for most of the tournament and that’s why it crashed around 4pm (because it probably got bumped or something). The reason why it crashed the first time when it was stored locally is still a mystery to me though.
Absolutely reasonable. Teams don’t need to be showing up an hour early to their matches. That’s why announcements are made a while in advance to alert the teams that we are running early and will be going to match #XXX before we break for lunch. Sure, we could have done a better job of announcing that, but I don’t think it’s that unreasonable to expect teams (with proper notice) to show up early because the event is running early. If SocalRobot missed the announcement, I am sorry, and we will try to announce it more often and make it more obvious next time.
Thank you, but it’s not quite as impressive as you make it sound. After the team decided to quit the tournament at the last second, I adjusted the match start time in TM (as it was right before we were handing out match schedules).
Due to space constraints we unfortunately had only 2 per table.
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll keep this in mind for our next event.