+1 I agree. It’s more important for a ref to be willing to listen to competitors’ arguments when they bring up a rule or Q&A and be willing to admit you made a mistake than to know the rules perfectly and get every ruling right the first time.
WOW, and here I thought I witnessed some odd behavior. We too were at a tourney recently and one of our alliance partners placed the cube in the colored tile, albeit was over the color to grey line. Their bot came in scooped it up and tossed it over the fence. It wasnt until the end of the match the ref came over and removed the scoring cube, and all of the stars the went over as a result. Told the teams that these points do not count. No warning, no explanation, nothing… (until we asked What gives?) Cost the alliance the win. This was the crux of it. I would never ask for results to be changed for our bot was having a hard time in that whole meet. If it could have went wrong for us, it did. We did learn a tremendous amount,
During the inspection the team was told your parts can’t be wiggly (if they touched it - and they did), when attached by rubberbands, that the start of the match the same connecting mechanisms must be identical to the inspection (this part I get). But this led to random inspections on before certain matches.
The field electronics stopped working, and the school did a fantastic job of using competition controllers to keep the fields moving. However the rep from the school used 2 controllers, and never once looked at the timer, keeping his eyes on the field. 1 controller and not looking at the field of play to keep all timing fair. Im not saying anyone would have cheated, but we have to keep the honest, even the head ref agreed, but never did anything about it.
I will preface that we are a fairly new school/teams. Since December of 2016 for 1 team, and a whole team exchange on the other, in Jan 2107. Since we are still learning everything we can do, We do not care about wins and losses, but teaching STEM to help the students learn, create repeatable actions, and learn where hardwork, education, imagination can take you.
2 SEMI Final appearances
3 Quarter Final appearances
1 Championship and State Invite.
2 royal shellackings
All Since December 2016
WOW, and here I thought I witnessed some odd behavior. We too were at a tourney recently and one of our alliance partners placed the cube in the colored tile, albeit was over the color to grey line. Their bot came in scooped it up and tossed it over the fence. It wasnt until the end of the match the ref came over and removed the scoring cube, and all of the stars the went over as a result. Told the teams that these points do not count. No warning, no explanation, nothing… (until we asked What gives?) Cost the alliance the win. This was the crux of it. I would never ask for results to be changed for our bot was having a hard time in that whole meet. If it could have went wrong for us, it did. We did learn a tremendous amount,
In this case, the cube was improperly introduced and at the end of the match should have been removed from the opposite side of the fence and placed in or near your alliance starting tile. The stars should not have been removed. At least that is my understanding as a referee.
During the inspection the team was told your parts can’t be wiggly (if they touched it - and they did), when attached by rubberbands, that the start of the match the same connecting mechanisms must be identical to the inspection (this part I get). But this led to random inspections on before certain matches.
I have never heard a rule about parts being “jiggly”. It is no where on the inspection checklist.
The field electronics stopped working, and the school did a fantastic job of using competition controllers to keep the fields moving. However the rep from the school used 2 controllers, and never once looked at the timer, keeping his eyes on the field. 1 controller and not looking at the field of play to keep all timing fair. Im not saying anyone would have cheated, but we have to keep the honest, even the head ref agreed, but never did anything about it.
I would be curious to find out why the field electronics stopped working. In over a decade of running events, the only time we have have the electronics fail was forgetting to turn off automatic updates on the computer running a pair of fields and having to restart everything once it finished updates. Luckily, TM does a great job of backing up as it runs, so little was lost other than time.
I’ve experienced this issue in 2 different cases:
- When running the tournament on a slow computer with outdated internals and way too much software bloat (TM will crash fairly quickly; probably not enough resources for it)
- When unplugging/replugging USB devices (generally fixable simply by reinitializing the field controllers from the icon in the system tray)
In both cases, the master tournament computer (running the TM server) was also running field control. I suppose dedicating a computer to field control would solve at least the 2nd case I mentioned, but setting up a wired LAN for such a scenario has been more effort than it’s worth.
A cube placed on both an alliance tile and a gray tile is not improperly introduced.
Sorry, I misread the reference. Yes if the cube is touching the alliance starting tile is is properly introduced.
Since EP’s might be looking at this, I will add one from a recent event my team attended. Early in the day there were field control issues, and the person running the field initiated autonomous 3x in a row without having students reset their bots. Please, don’t make that mistake. Teams using time-based auton can only cringe as their bot attempts to tear itself apart by lifting its arm far beyond its limits.
I went to a competition in Killeen and I was really disappointed in the lack of preparation there seemed to be. I understand that people can make mistakes under pressure but there were just too many field errors.
One particular issue that seriously hampered almost every team were fatal connection issues. Competition Switches on both sides were flaky and entire alliances would suddenly quit working even though the robots were in tip top condition. The lack of knowledge and preparation on the judges part was crippling at times. Some rules were either ruled incorrectly or not even ruled altogether.
One team was entirely screwed over because of the competition switches failing.
The one way I see this being resolved is having the volunteers conducting like a dry ruin with the hosting school’s robots or something similar. This way, they can have practice and get in the groove of how things work.
I couldn’t agree more with this statement. I can almost guarantee that this is the exact same event that @Doug Moyers is referring to. As someone who has attended the killeen event 3 years in a row, I can tell you for a fact that the event has always been flawed and needs to be well monitored in future games. Don’t get me wrong, the people that were actually running the event were very kind, but their logic and knowledge of how the game worked and how the actual competition went was not. The competition did not have any practice fields for one thing, which while not extremely important was still extremely disappointing. The main issue was the malfunctioning of the competition switches. People would have autonomous routines that would not perform correctly and disconnections halfway through the matches. The referees did not find it an issue at all and said that we just had robots that didn’t work, even though they worked perfectly when we had our own competition switches plugged into them while practicing. This happened throughout the entire tournament and was the reason that my alliance lost the finals since the competition switches were basically dead by then killing pretty much every robot. One thing that I noticed that I had never seen before was a yellow light above where it says game on the joystick which indicated if a competition switch was connected or not, which definitely meant something by the end of the event. This was basically the last event to qualify Texas teams for their regional, and while I was not effected, I feel that the teams that were should definitely be looked into.
That sounds like quite a problem. Playing devils advocate here. I’m not sure how things work elsewhere in the world, but for us vex UK send us fields and the associated electronics unless we have our own. This is usually one set with no spares. When running/helping out at events the first thing I do is test the field control, but even if I find a problem it would be nigh impossible to fix. However EPs and referees should notice this if it is happening repeatedly and although it isn’t favourable I personally would have switched to the manual competition switch if it was that large a problem (With one person solely in charge of the switch and watching the timer to ensure fair timings).
Side note: I think the best referees and judges are former VRC competitors as they are familiar with the workings of vex and how to run a competition. I’ve seen enough alliance selections have to be restarted due to having someone inexperienced running them.
Interestingly, I haven’t yet seen any problems with match controllers or driver interfaces at any tournament. The times I’ve seen field control problems were all due to one of three reasons:
- Bad Cat5 cable
- Extremely slow and underpowered computer being used
- Needing to reconfigure the match controllers connected to the computer for whatever reason to make TM recognize them again (I’ve not seen this happen more than once for the whole tournament day, if it happens at all)
Be glad you weren’t at Crown Point this weekend. They did it the same way as you described at Iron Pride, and when I showed them Karthik’s Post on the rule, I got the response “Well, since we started the day doing it wrong, we are going to just continue to do it that way to be consistent. You know we just want to qualify as many teams for state as possible.” WTF
I agree, we have good event partners, but sadly there is a stark difference between the rules, philosophies and overall events in Northern Indiana vs Central Indiana.
Yeah. There seems to be a lack of knowledge in Indiana on how skills work this season.
Evidently, their failure to follow the rules even after you showed them they were doing skills incorrectly, may impact who gets into state. I know they told you they were continuing to do it wrong in order to be “fair” but as you and I both know, it becomes unfair to others at other tournaments that followed the rules.
Your concerns have been noted and will be addressed to make sure your future events are a better experience. When I am aware of issues that occur at events I was unable to attend I make it a point to address those issues by working with the EP’s to make their future events better. Feel free to reach put to me when you notice things that can be made better.