Interesting. They probably will use VEXNet then until V5 is completely in use.
Exactly. That’s my issue with VAR because it could be helpful in select cases but would make a competition significantly longer. Also, many hosts cannot provide all the equipment that would be needed for VAR so it would have to be an optional feature of competitions.
Yeah this is from the Robot Section of the manual:
Even when full V5 adoption is in effect, I’m not sure they’re going to switch to Bluetooth during matches.
As a former FTC competitor and in experimenting with BT with something else, I had an awful experience. In FTC there was an incredibly high latency between my controller input and the robot responding.
You might have missed my point - I was certainly not suggesting that anyone “mail it in” for Worlds. I was suggesting the opposite.
It’s unfortunate that you don’t consider coaches (which I am one), EPs, and other’s opinions. We see things from a different vantage point than the students and come with experiences gained from a variety of life activities. If your only metric of how valuable one’s opinion is is how many hours they devote to building a robot, then you may be missing some valduable perspectives.
As an EP and current competitor and former HS competitor, I find this view to be belittling of other viewpoints and perspectives. I agree with @Gear Geeks above. Hours put in shouldn’t be the only metric for how valuable one’s opinion is. There’s a larger community who’s input to the VEX Robotics experience is also important.
It’s not, and there are tournaments for it. There are people who are very good at it, and earn money from it. It’s actually an interesting game to study, since it is purely balanced theoretically, but not in actual practice.
This thread is supposed to be civil. Perhaps you don’t realize it, but what you wrote there is not.
I assure you Gear Geeks and coaches like her understand what it means to put hundreds to thousands of hours into a competitive robot, and to lose on what is essentially a coin toss. Or worse. It isn’t helpful to discount an entire class of peoples’ experience out of prejudice that only people exactly like you really understand.
Your opinion and your views are very important. But please remember that other people have experiences and insights that matter as well.
+1
+1
Every championship team in either sports or robotics that I’ve had the opportunity to talk to has mentioned there’s always an element of luck.
No one is saying that it’s all luck and no skill or vice versa. It’s a mixture of both. It’s not all or nothing.
After watching the penalty shoot outs, I’d argue there is a fair amount of luck involved.
There is also tremendous skill, but having been a keeper, when that ball is on the spot you generally pick a side to leap and commit to it.
I do not think that Bo1 is purely luck based, when our team lost in their division we didn’t lose because the other team was lucky, we lost because they were good. maybe we could have beat them in a second attempt, but maybe not. In the end I do not foresee this change being a huge issue.
One thing that hasn’t been discussed that that Bo1 allows is extra time for more qualification matches. Since the elim portion of the tournament takes far less time with Bo1, our organization will be have more qualification matches so that the Top 8 will be more representative of the best teams at the tournament. It is far harder to go undefeated and lock down that pole position when you have to play 8-9 matches instead of 5-6.
The alternative systems that have been pitched have like 6 more matches on average than the new Bo1 system. Your talking about adding 3 more matches PER team to qualification rounds. You would need an event of 8 teams total for that math to work out.
In my experience with time outs and teams moving from field to field the elim part of the tournament takes much longer than squeezing in anther round or two of qualification matches. We typically can run qualification rounds with 45 seconds to 1 minute of gap in between, and our tournaments typically aren’t over 24 teams. Adding 2 more qualification rounds is feasible.
It will need played with, but we are intending to add more qualification rounds, the number has yet to be determined.
There are great competitions for all of those. But how often does a really good alliance get beaten by a couple of push bots? There is luck in any competition but they work and practice that the kids put into this mitigates the luck. BO3 also mitigates the luck, but if I were on any alliance in a tournament but the number one seed I would want BO1.
We would if they let us!!! I am all for changing VEXU to VEX Unlimited! I WILL CRUSH THE CHILDREN!!! 
Guess that’s why they won’t let us.
I am a little surprised at the general level of animosity towards Event Partners. We’re all right, ya know? I am under the assumption that most EP’s, like myself, also have teams, like the 20+ I have. I don’t think that anyone would understand all of the effort that kids put into this and the logistics of tournaments and the consequences of these decisions better than us.
Look, I’m famous!
I’ve made my views on BO1 very clear. I just wanted to add something that I have more experience with, that robot (127X in the video). It was extremely reliable all tournament and we never once tipped in practice or in matches. If something happens once, I make sure it never happens again, but we never even got close to tipping. Even with the lift as high as it was, the robot had to be tilted >45 degrees for its center of gravity to be outside of the frame of the robot, leading to a sustained tip (we tested after this match). The DR4B motors were even mounted at the base of the robot, and the weight of the lift was greatly minimized with aluminum hardware. It’s not a robot that tips any more easily than any standard ITZ robot. Likely the opposite. The fact is, that robot would not have tipped without another robot entangling it exactly as the opponent did. Entangling, not some minor interaction or hard pushing. This was far from intentional by them, but as the rules stand our opponents benefitted from unintentionally tipping our robot. That seems like a loophole to me. The rules listed that “intentional or egregious” violations of the rule prohibiting tipping an opponent would warrant a DQ, so I thought this loophole was covered by the diction of “egregious,” but according to the powers that be, “egregious” is a synonym for “intentional.” Someone should inform Webster’s dictionary. (Actual definition: very bad.) This leaves a lot of questions. For instance, why was “egregious” followed by “(match affecting)” in past versions of the manual and no longer? The use of parenthesis Indicates that “match affecting” was a synonym of egregious in the past, and that more closely follows the actual dictionary definition. Moreover, if “egregious” really means “intentional,” why repeat? Intentional is a very clear word. We all know what it means, without a doubt (though debate may rage over how to determine intent). With this interpretation, though, the use of “or egregious” serves only to muddy the meaning of “intentional” and create further confusion.
If VEX does keep a BO1 format, or even if they do not, there should be a rule calling for a replay in the case of potentially match affecting violations that are unintentional. It seems unfair to me that a referee would have to call a match like this either way.
Let’s be real, they’re not changing from BO1 no matter what we say. I admire the optimism from some of the younger users, though!
For IQ, the first year after they released the smart radio it wasn’t legal, but now it is. The IQ students are always a maximum of 10 feet of their robot, though.
BT should work up to 30ish feet… So it could work.
Yeah, this is a reasonable request. I’d also like to see some sort of protection for instances where robots are no longer communicating with the controller, especially at the start of the match. Nothing is worse than watching you team lose because you can’t move your machine.
I would choose a better example than Monopoly as your middle one. If you know what you’re doing, Monopoly is essentially pure luck. Consider something different, like bridge. In bridge there is a lot of luck, but using duplicate they try to set up scenarios where the luck is as fairly distributed as possible.
I’ve said the same thing, especially since the replay rule is already present. All it will take is encouraging its use. That should take some pressure off of refs, too.
Also, if anyone wants to tell me how I should have changed 127X to be untippable in this kind of situation while still being at all competitive, I’d love to hear it! I thought we did our best at that.
This is a good point. Even before Bo1 came into the picture, teams would always want to be consistent.
Facing stronger opponents may lower the scores for weaker teams, but everyone has a range of 50 or more, so even the best teams have wide bell curves (although the eventual world champions had the highest high point, the lowest low point, and the second-narrowest bell curve).
Oddly enough, SPAM’s alliance (the one a lot of people say is the weakest) had the lowest range, the second-highest low point, and the 3rd-highest high point, although most of their scores in the middle were in the late 90’s, and they benefited from strong teams being eliminated early in their division.
I hate the indicator lights. It is impossible to clearly see which light is on unless you are right in front of it (I know the flashing is different), and the darn kids are usually in the way doing their thing. And if you lose because you are disabled I would just prefer to do a replay, which is one extra match instead of two. If the light goes off during driver control during a match I would want to just cut the match at that point and restart it. Wouldn’t even bother finishing the match.
I think we need to be a little more lenient on doing replays in general. There have definitely been “extreme circumstances” where we don’t see replays. If there a call that needs to be made, and the ref concedes that they were looking at something else at that moment and don’t feel comfortable making the call just rerun it. Unless you have 4 refs each looking at each robot things will be missed and the refs need to power to make a call… And to not make a call.
It’s not coming back. Period.
Instead of whining about it I am simply trying to find ways to improve it. I do think this adds extra pressure to my reffing staff and there will need to be extra training about when to and when not to re-run matches. I do think there should be more allowance for re-runs.
For example if I tell the teams there, that if their robot doesn’t run in a knockout match we will consider a re run every time (assuming it not an unplugged battery or something) that should calm some nerves.