Okay, sure. But most of you kids aren’t paying for any of this? If for some reason all the angry competitors organized and quit in protest maybe you’d see a shift, but honestly you’d just be denying yourselves the opportunity to do robotics in most schools for a significant amount of the time you are young enough to compete.
Assume you’re right. Vex is a silly game. What are the actual ramifications of that? Is bo1 or bo3 a better idea because you think vex is silly? What point are you trying to make?
I responded to the multiple people using this line of reasoning in a post above, but I’ll do it again in more depth since it seems to be a popular opinion.
This thread has also had a lot of “[blank] doesn’t matter” and “who cares” because it only affects a small margin of teams. The top 1% of teams matter immensely and I’m going to do my best to explain why. VEX has made it clear that they don’t care about finding the best robot, there is no arguing that isn’t the case. If their main objective is to reach as many students as possible, this direction is a mistake.
Let’s look at professional sports leagues as an example:
Star athletes are what attract viewers. Teams know this, which is why teams offer max contracts to attract top talent. The more fans and viewers a team attract, the more merchandise they can sell and the more capital the team has to attract more talent.
MLB also has the “play ball” initiative to get children involved in little league, which fuels enthusiasm in the sport, more kids fall in love with baseball and new talent bubbles up from the bottom. The whole system is self-propagating, and it works brilliantly.
I think VEX is going in the opposite direction. Take away the best baseball players in the world and you have the AAA league. AAA players are still very good, but don’t generate the same excitement.
The idea that if the best VEX competitors leave, it doesn’t matter because someone else will still compete and win makes no sense to me. If it were true that there’s no real difference between the best VEX competitors and the very good ones, why don’t we see a 10 way tie in skills each season?
My concern is that the VEX brand will become diluted and the competition will degrade over time. FTC and VEX started in similar places, VEX took off and FTC didn’t. I think one of the main reasons is that FTC always had the reputation of being less competitive and more about holding hands. I have never done FTC so I can’t say whether this is accurate or not, but that has certainly been its reputation.
If you think that VEX is still the best option and people will just have to deal with it, that’s not true. We are already seeing some of the best teams leaving. A competitor will see the opportunity and eat VEX’s lunch. For a change of pace, check out what DJI is doing with competitive robotics.
If you don’t know or care who 8066A is, that is a massive fail and a missed opportunity on VEX’s part. The hexbug commercial I referenced earlier was a good start, but I would like to see VEX embrace top talent and infuse it into the brand. Making STEM as popular as sports was one of the founding principles of FIRST, but I don’t think they have done a great job making it a reality. If I were either FIRST or VEX, I would study what is happening in Esports.
Obviously at some point there is no use in trying to change VEX’s mind, and the “whiners and complainers” will be silenced, but I don’t think that is an ideal outcome. I don’t think “finding the best robot” should be the focus, but attracting and retaining the best teams in the world is a crucial part of being successful in their primary objective.
This probably deserves its own thread, but I wanted it to be read in the context of the posts here.
Your main argument has been Bo1 is bad because I might lose because of X, Y, and Z scenario.
My argument is losing doesn’t matter because winning trophies isn’t the point. It’s just a silly game and a goal. If you’ve made it to the finals what does giving you more chances give you? I’d rather you have a hard loss and be prepared to make a more consistent design for the next tournament. Being able to just fix your simple mistake during your three tries doesn’t encourage effective countermeasures if you have more than one chance to win. Furthermore it often punishes the teams that maybe take fewer risks, but design a consistent robot when they are defeated by glass cannons that get three cracks at them.
Bettering yourself and learning from mistakes is the main point. I have similar beliefs in regards to unlimited skills runs. It kills me when the team that can land their perfect run in their first and second try gets beat by a team that has 10-15+ try’s throughout the day. It’s rewarding the wrong behavior.
Oof haha, thank you for checking me on that. I will reevaluate, but I feel like most of my main points were valid.
Edit:
I definitely had the definition reversed, it happens. Small things do snowball into big things, the fallacy is in suggesting you are able to predict how it will. The question is really to what extent does top teams leaving matter. Some people are saying the impact will be none or insignificant, I disagree.
Do you honestly believe that one team deciding to pick up their ball and go home will impact vex’s growth outside of their home region? Like really truly deeply believe it?
Aside from the ethics concerns with using minors to be a the company image, I think this team is Important to you and a few people you know not the many thousands of young roboteers entering into vex. I am not sure who the IQ kids that are transitioning into vex look up to, but I’ll bet it isn’t some team in Singapore.
edit to add: I only mention their home region because of how few teams are there to begin with. loosing that whole organization might make a large percentage there.
More than one team has left already, but yes. I also don’t think growth in the short term matters as much as richness, which will accelerate growth.
Just for the record, I’m not suggesting that VEX should focus on individual students. They already do team profiles for certain teams in the dome, I would like to see more of that.
This is getting very off topic, sorry!
If anything is damaging growth its the mishandling of the V5 launch and the subsequent supply and demand disaster.
or even worse their inability to ship Vex IQ motors. I know for a fact that several schools could not start their teams this year because they could not get their hands on a super kit.
I’ll just say that outside this forum and the Discord most of these “super teams” you guys are mentioning are basically unknown, and they could all leave tomorrow and we’d find the next great team a week later posting things online. It’s not as if these people have the gravity of athletes like Lebron or Bradey. They’re high school kids with a cult following .
It’s like the one Indy punk rock band I like. When they stopped making music only me and a few friends were sad, it didn’t bring down the industry.
Step back and look at the big picture here, In my state we have over 1500 IQ Teams. The biggest thing that impact their long term involvement and overall development is having enough events to compete at. In our state we had 127 events for 1500 teams to compete, it leads to some teams not getting the opportunity to compete and develop. That’s the sort of thing the stunts growth. Not a team that rage quits over a rule change.
PS: they’re called ‘City Lights’ 
Let me help you here. In 2007-08 there was a split between VEX and FIRST. Lots of the then current teams had 3.2 billion dollars of VEX parts. We split off to protect our investment. We partnered up with RECF because they offer the biggest BANG for the BUCK. VEX continues to out pace FTC because of that fact. It was never about “less competitive”. I do VRC because my donation dollars go farther. I do VIQ because my donation dollars go farther. I want more roboteers.
Now having said that, I send roboteers to FRC teams that have the skills and desire to build that kind of robot. But again, $35K a year for a robot to inspire 35 roboteers doesn’t line up with $35K to build teams that will inspire over 100 roboteers.
Pick up and look around. We play basketball, not because Zion Williamson plays or has a shoe deal or because he has a $8 million insurance if he doesn’t make the top 10 NBA draft. We play because we like round ball. We build robots because it’s fun, we build robots because it’s cool, we build robots because we are never going to pull down a Nike Deal, but we are going to pull down a cool engineering job that will let us put Nike’s on our feet.
I’m helping to make some of the 8 million engineers that make my cool stuff, And 99.5% of them are not going to worlds, but they are going to change the world.
As a person who has completed in vex robotics 4 years now I personally enjoyed the B03 rather than the B01. B03 allowed for second chances when crazy outcomes would occur, for instance like a ball during auton flipping over a robot or even a disconnect from the tower. This year at a competition during auton a ball got under my teams robot and we couldn’t move the whole time, causing the match to be a 1 v 2. Although I doubt they will be returning to B03 I would be happy if they would.
I think that was more like 2007-2008, which was the “Quad Quandry” year, the last season where FIRST used VEX for FVC/FTC. 2008-2009 was FTC’s horrible hockey puck game with the horrible Tetrix kit and horrible exploding motors (you think the V5 motors have a high failure rate – I filled a large paper grocery bag with dead FTC motors that year, at $30 a pop), which had the misfortune, for FIRST anyways, of being up against VRC Elevation, one of the best of the mid-sized robot games.
Yep, I’ll go back and fix it, Quad and Bridge Battle was the same year. We played both and never looked back.
We played Face Off against local FTC and VEX teams and the VEX roboteers crushed.
Over 10 years ago, times fun when you are having flies.
Thanks for the perspective, I’ve been around for a while but not quite that long. The initial shift from FTC to VEX would account for an initial boost in the first few years. The $ per student reached you mentioned would be a major factor for a lot of people. I also think that VEX has benefited from being seen as the more serious competition.
This is all good and wholesome, and I agree. That being said, watching Zion Williamson jump from the freethrow line and throw down an earthquaking dunk has value too. Pick up games and nba games both have their place. In my opinion, the best way to reach the most kids is to make VEX part of popular culture. To do that, we need the Zion Williamsons of the world.
Or not. I pulled all what I posted from when I read a SI waiting for my eye guy to do his thing.
Machine that does my prescription while I look at a mountain road, another machine that scans the retina of my eye and builds a 3D model that they spin and look at for issue. Blood vessels that look like 12" pipes but in reality are less than 1/3 of a hair. Put your face here, read these letters, crisp, clean. Here is your script, see you in a year. — That was much more impressive than Zion. — roboteers that make that, do that, make life better from engineering, touch everone. Sorry Zion, bball is cool, engineers are cooler.
I don’t really watch bball either. I’m not even sure if Zion could dunk from the free throw line, it sure looks like he probably can from the few clips I’ve seen.
Life changing engineering is taken for granted all the time. It takes a specific type of person to think that an eye scanning machine is more interesting than a star athlete. Most people just want their eyes fixed. The challenge is to show kids that engineering can be cooler than bball and should be given the same status in culture. Isn’t that the point of VEX and FIRST?
Yes it is, it is exactly that.
…
And none of that cares about B03 - B01. Think the long game, the long game is what matters. Not this year, but this cohort of roboteers. What will they do, what skills can we give them, what can they achieve.
Exactly. I think the bo1 vs bo3 issue is completely trivial. Inconsequential. sure, it may give one party a better time at one or two events, but in the long run, it doesn’t matter. I think bigger issues are things that actually affect people’s interest in vex, and I hardly think bo1 will do that. Can we all just agree to disagree about bo1 vs bo3 and get on with it?
When taking into account BO1 v BO3, one also has to consider 16 alliances. They are what even it out. 16 alliances mean 32 teams in eliminations. Those extra 8 teams (considering 3TA with BO3) will feel more rewarded being in eliminations. Thusly promoting more positive feelings and memories about and toward engineering.
(But then again, these teams will likely continue in the field regardless.)
@Foster I am guessing you are a coach from your post so you didn’t grow up with social media while you were in middle school or high school. I think what @aaronlucas may be try to get at with the Zion Williamson thing is how big an influence people like that have on people who like/do the same activity. I imagine the vast majority of middle and high school basketball players follow Zion and everything that has to do with him on all their social media because they want to be just like him, or even better. This is sort of the same thing with Vex. Many top teams have Instagram accounts with hundreds of fellow roboteers following them. Many top teams have YouTube accounts with hundreds of fellow roboteers following them. This inspires the students to what is possible and they want to be just as good as their favorite Vex team or even better than them. I know as a coach all these top teams do not matter to you. If I were to try and talk to my high school robotics coach about some robotics team that is not a team we normally compete against he would not know them or really care about them, like most all coaches would. But if I talk about a top team with a student who is dedicated to robotics and is aspiring to become an engineer, more often than not it would be a lively discussion about this top team. Last year I was on 8675A otherwise known as Fuzzy Wuzzy 2.0 and I had no idea until US Open and Worlds last year how much of an impact my YouTube and Instagram account had on other teams. I just would walk around and people would say to their teammates “here look there is Fuzzy!”, and would come up and talk to me. I also got asked to sign robots, cones, shirts, hats etc. I took countless photos with teams I didn’t know, because my team was their Zion Williamson. I even once at Worlds got followed to our RV because someone wanted to talk to us, and we chatted for half an hour. Students and a few coaches came up to me and said they would watch all my videos and were always looking for my next tournaments matches to watch, one coach even said all his team would talk about some practices is “Fuzzy” and he finally understood who “Fuzzy” was. Last year I traveled to an out of state tournament in a small town that just started robotics. For the students on these teams it was their first tournament. When they saw what my robot could do I saw the same fire in them to learn that I had when I watched US Nationals finals my 6th Grade year (Gateway). So my point is these Top teams have a huge impact on new teams and with social media the impact is greater! It is not the individual Top team that matters really, it is the fact that this is a great team that does really good and share with the Vex community to better all teams! So yes Top teams do not matter directly to coaches, students learning matter to coaches. But Top teams definitely matter to coaches indirectly as they motivate students to learn.