Is this really the VEX community we know and love?

VEX Robotics Competition Discussion
#23

Welp, this is an interesting situation. Basically, tl;dr both sides are wrong in some way.

In my conversations with Taran, he seems to be a nice and bright kid who genuinely loves the competition. He even helped some teams I was on in the past with parts and funding. I don’t think you can really deny that he’s a pretty alright person. However, I can agree with Zach | 929U in that Taran did (and to an extent still does) make himself out to be a bad guy when publicly talking to other teams. he has jokingly and not-jokingly mentioned reporting certain individuals over (albeit a bit edgy) jokes and has before actually sent conversations that people had online to RECF in an attempt to get the team reprimanded. Now, this isn’t actually wrong per say, but this is just context as to why some people don’t really like him.

As for the situation at hand, we can look at it from a competitive sense first. Taran has pretty close interaction with Team A and he definitely shows it. Now, I’m not saying any of these things are wrong per say, but in the lens of Team A (A highly competitive team with a really good shot of winning the World Championship), what Taran has done is a bit much. He

  • Has gone up to their robot on numerous occasions with a camera (without permission) and taken photos with some of those being circulated in his own private sphere

  • Shared a video of Team A’s skills run and didn’t take it down until public pressure forced him to

  • Posted a video of a mechanism that, although isn’t revolutionary, was almost an exact copy of Team A’s mechanism aside from the holes being slightly farther apart.

I’m not including the most recent slider incident since that was blown out of proportions by the community. It’s just a slider, regardless of how similar it is to Team A’s (numerous people have similar concepts). But, you get the jist. Going off what Zach | 929U said, Taran has done numerous things to make this team lose their competitive edge in this competition.

Now, in Taran’s defense, most of what he has done isn’t technically wrong and this has basically become a witch hunt. Don’t get me wrong, as a competitor I don’t enjoy seeing a team’s secrets get divulged for the world because I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. I’m simply arguing that the response to it was a bit extreme. For example, in reference to bullet C, Team A had a not so professional response to the whole situation that was bordering on some RECF rules (Will not mention what was actually said). Although the way Team A handled this situation with Taran for the most part was mature, they kind of let themselves go at that point. In terms of the community, Taran essentially could not talk in a public channel without others criticizing him, making fun of him, or preventing him from sharing his opinions in a productive manner. I understand and respect Taran’s decision to leave the Discord after what happened to him daily on there. it got so repetitive and toxic that I saw it as cyber bullying. Now, keep in mind that most comments towards Taran were calm and civilized and that this was a select few vocal individuals that took it too far. To sum up my argument for Taran, he didn’t actually break any guidelines and the responses to him got to the point where you could say they broke the Ethos of the competition.

I made this post just to get my opinion of this out here and so that it could help some others understand my point of view (Although, most people already have their firm opinions on this topic). I’m not endorsing any hate towards any side. Taran is a pretty ok dude.

19 Likes
#24

I have a couple things to say here. I held off on posting last night, but this needs to be said.

Let’s start from the top.

I was new to discord, and not aware that that stuff happens regularly. There was a single individual where issues extended beyond that, and DRow took care of it. I have literally never emailed the RECF.

A couple of points here

  1. Never has an idea been stolen. Only innovated upon. I would never steal any designs. Of course, it is very hard to prove either side of this. That’s why in the real world engineering notebooks have real witnesses and can be used in a court of law to prove when an idea was invented.

  2. In every instance where I have taken inspiration from someone, I have credited them. The description in my cube lock video mentioned a team I saw something a bit different but sorta similar work on. In my Intake thread, I said,

My tray slider was legit just something I CADed and posted. I have done the same with 2 other designs of tray sliders. There was no need to credit anyone, as it was a design that I worked on during that day, using principles I used on my cascade lift last year, such as spacer sliders.

  1. The phrase “stolen ideas from teams, very very slightly modified them without improving functionality, and claimed them as his own ideas.” could be used to describe every single team this year with a complex-style traybot. Meta designs are constantly evolving. No competent team makes their robot without a good knowledge and understanding of robots that have already been made and documented. If anyone doesn’t want mechanisms on their robot available as public knowledge, they shouldn’t take them to events.

  2. Designs I have released have not been the most complicated. The cube lock was a simple 4-bar linkage. The 3-point intake was a triangle. The tray was just a spacer slider. Team\,A does not own the concept of triangles. That would be dumb. I refer readers of this post to this Wikipedia entry.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll

  3. Every single damn time I post a design, whatever it be, I am accused of stealing or leeking Team\,A. If I were to post a tutorial on how to build a good chassis, I’d be willing to bet that a not insignificant number of people would suddenly be of the mind that Team\,A owns the concept of wheels.

A few more points here.

  1. This was 100% taken out-of-context. When I revealed to the VTOW discord server my design for a cube lock, it was stated that it was overly-complicated and not good. To a number of people, I sent that text blob about my sister team. I stretched the truth to make it appear as if my design was a better one than it actually was, because people were much more likely to trust Team\,A 's design than my own. As someone complaining about me taking screenshots out of context, this is quite hypocritical of you.

  2. I sent these in DMs so that that wouldn’t be public. I did NOT want my faulty statements in any sort of public record, because of their incorrect nature. I did not want to confuse anyone in an instance such as this one as to what the truth actually was. Note the use of a wink emoji, which I used to indicate that the text I had written wasn’t what the actual truth was. The full matter of the story is this. I CAD hundreds of designs. I have no friends or life outside of robotics. This 4-bar piece was one of them. I had my doubts about if it would work or not. After like 5 of my other designs had failed, I noticed my sister team did something similar to one of my designs. While yes, I would not have built this if they had not built their similar concept, they didn’t give me the idea of this design. This leads into my next point

  3. That was a DM. Generally speaking, it’s not cool to do stuff like that publicly, especially when you know for a fact that what I said in said DM wasn’t to be taken out of the context surrounding it.

  4. The reason that my messages have been “since deleted” is that after you and your friends made me not feel safe still being on Discord, I used a script to clean up everything. I got rid of all of my messages in VTOW and DMs to all offending persons, including yourself.

  5. Barin explicitly requested that Team\,A remain unnamed. I am abiding by his wishes. I request that you blur out the team numbers and names in that image.

VEX is competitive. If someone does something that makes your robot no longer at the cutting edge of the meta, if you’re as great and amazing as you claim, go innovate more. If your robot would no longer be amazing if someone else saw it, you should not take it to a place where others can see it.

In case I haven’t hammered the point home yet, after the season is over, I would be more than happy to share my library of pictures of Team\,A's robot, to prove that I couldn’t have stolen anything. My only pictures are from a match in November against my former team. They are crappy side-angle shots. You can’t discern anything from them

I will also point out that the team leader from Team\,A said to me in a private message that the designs weren’t the same, right before I published my video.

This has all been an incredible force of stress in my life, and it making me strongly consider if I want to compete in VRC at all in the future, let alone if anyone would want to be on the same team as myself. I hope that the situation at least a small bit clearer now.

11 Likes
#26

I think the harassment that Taran receives isn’t appropriate or deserved. But it is understandable. Taran has done multiple things that would make him develop enemies in VEX. And your post leaves all of this out. Hes not an angel, but neither is anyone harassing him. Im not gonna waste my time writing a long post like I did in the cube lock one, but can we please just stop these SCA vs VTOTW things, they are annoying

Also @Zach_929U and @NightsRosario’s arguements are the best. They bring in both perspectives which is what we should be looking at no matter whose side we are on.

11 Likes
#27

Firstly I think the context behind each situation needs to be understood. Taran was sending screenshots to get people removed from Vex. Also Joey, I do not think that you can say that Taran was not trying to send conversations in direct messages. I have no other way to prove that Taran cloned other peoples designs without posting screenshots. There is no hatred for Taran fueling me posting this but I think that more of the context of why people are angry should be made public. All you guys are doing currently is taking Tarans word that he created these concepts.

I cannot post these without you guys calling me a hypocrite. Quite frankly I cannot give you an example either since Taran deleted all of his messages. I specifically remember him saying that he has had these things designed for months before he saw the team that he allegedly cloned. This to me sounds like he is taking credit for the design.

I really do not think you are reading my post. The reason people are mad is because he is taking credit for others work. It is more plain to see if you have seen team A’s robot before it went to public competitions. Unfortunately I do not have permission (I asked) to post things on their robot as evidence. You are just going to have to take my word that people are not frustrated because they do not like Taran.

The issue, once again, is not you sharing ideas. Its you sharing others ideas and taking credit/not giving credit for them. You said you credited a team for the cube lock video you posted but I think that you know, and you admitted that it was took from Team A.

This literally is the context, There were no more messages sent that day, there was no discussion about it somewhere else. You just sent that video to me then the conversation was over.

Excuse me? I have only talked to you maybe 5 times before and almost never on Vtotw. I do not understand how I was a part of you leaving the server. I cannot speak for some of my friends though, and I condemn there actions taken towards you.

This is the goal of the company Vex, this does not mean that most competitors share the same goals. While vex is not all about winning, it is an aspect of competing every year that I think teams should strive for. There would be no intensive to innovate and push for better and better designs if there wasn’t a way to prove that your design is amazing. Winning competitions are that proof.

8 Likes
#28

Its definitely not SCA vs VTOW, I am on both but we b chill, it’s just some people who are in VTOW like harassing Taran and, because we know him, we stand up for him

5 Likes
#29

This is just vex though. At this point almost every single design in a copy of a copy of a copy. Should we just stop making all reveals and match plays so we don’t give away ideas? That’s where this mentality leads. Be secretive has its own consequences and it is up to you to deal with them not others.

That is incorrect. He was sending screenshots only because people were taking things to far. He had no intentions of removing people from vex, only telling on people who have been taking things to far, which can be scene as not so great, but not worthy of this level of attack.

1 Like
#30

@ZackJo Please stop with identifying people by name. It’s not the intent of this thread. Same goes for everyone else.

5 Likes
#31

This is not true, the screen shot in question was spread throughout the discord (not by Taran) and someone high up in the RECF was made aware of it (again not Taran) and thought something should be done

1 Like
#32

If someone gets teams season dqed and published unoriginal videos it’d be hard to trust them. I agree that bullying someone online through a forum isn’t a good solution to dealing with stolen ideas, but if ideas are taken and elaborated on it’d be fine imo. Posting copied ideas as your own is wrong. If someone were to do that but cited inspiration from a source, or perhaps got permission from the creator before posting I see nothing wrong with that (only saying this to prevent future incidences of “toxicity”). Just treat others how you’d wanna be treated for ez happy vex fun times. Also use common sense before you post it’ll raise your iq by 10 points I guarantee it.

#33

@DRow time for lock and people take break from internet?

13 Likes
#34

I agree. This thread should be locked (not permanently!) For at least a few hours.
(@)DanMantz, has this reached the necessity of reviewing the thread?

Edit: removed ping and changed request

3 Likes
#35

They litteraly gave credit to their inspiration lul

#36

Ok then I don’t see anything wrong with it. I never roasted Taran for copying ideas.

1 Like
#37

Don’t. They have already spoken to both us and Team\,A. Team\,A has not done anything new wrong.

#38

Ok then, I only meant reviewing the thread, but I’ll remove the post/ping.

#39