First of all, it is great that @DanMantz is serious about collecting feedback from this thread.
I use word “feedback” a lot for a reason. If there is one thing I want students to learn it is how important “feedback loops” are in everything we do. It is the essence of the Engineering Design Process, PID, and countless other applications. They were always important in the mechanical and electric designs and understanding them is going to be even more important in the upcoming era of the Artificial Intelligence.
Let me do a very quick aside with some background information before getting back to BO1 vs BO3.
I am a strong believer in the Murphy’s and Karma conservation laws when practicing engineering.
And before anyone starts to suspect me in believing that the nature operates that way, let me say that when the humans are in the decision making loop, they could sometimes do funny probability math, which would lead to somewhat irrational results. You need another seemingly irrational set of rules to compensate for that. When effects of both are combined you get much more stable and reliable system.
When you study Engineering Systems Analysis in college they will talk about the risk assessment matrix techniques and other “boring” stuff, but when the same principles are formulated in the anthropomorphic terms of Murphy’s and Karma conservation laws they are much easier to understand and follow. Humans had evolved with the natural ability to model behavior of other human beings much better than they understand dry formulas…
To anyone who is going to study the field of Artificial Intelligence, here is the essence of the subject: You have an internal model of the outside world, you use this model to predict how external world works and to determine what action you could take to achieve your goals, then you actually act and observe the results. Based on the observations you update the internal model then repeat. The more accurate your internal model is, the better the chance is that you will achieve your goals.
In some sense internal model is nothing more than a bunch of the feedback loops and weighting coefficients used in the decision making. And if it is complex and sophisticated enough it will actively seek additional information and feedback from the external entities to constantly update and improve the model.
The mathematical foundation for Murphy’s law lies in the probability and statistics while Karma conservation law could be explained by analyzing internal model of any decision making system and how it interacts with the outside world. There is a high correlations between somebody doing something bad or stupid toward others and being on the receiving end of the Karma the next time, because if their internal model is bad enough to allow decisions negatively affecting other entities, then it is likely also not accurate enough to make a good decisions that will affect themselves.
We don’t know how VEX/IFI or RECF work internally, we could only observe what they put out (be it new products, game rules, or official communications) and see how they react or not react to the external feedback and anomalous situations. However, based on those observations you could estimate some important parameters of their inner decision making process.
Unfortunately, Static/IME issues were never resolved and then concerns about VexNet disconnects in light of BO1 change caused a lot of heated arguments. The key here is that every time we see an external entity drag their feet in acknowledging or resolving one problem, you would expect similarly slow response handling another problem, especially if they operate under increased stress. Effect of those observations multiplied by the emotional charge, associated with the subject at hand, accumulates over time and is the basis of the persistent negative opinion.
I could imagine someone will say “Look we run the Worlds with BO1 just fine, and there was no end of world as the students were whining/panicking about.” To which I will reply that you cannot know what effect it had inside the students’ minds and how much damage points VEX brand had taken as the result, especially if you seemingly keep ignoring their feedback. In fact the VRC program end goal is to transform students’ minds and not to play record number of 2v2 matches in the shortest amount of time. Having a healthy and robust system is just the means to achieve that end goal.
I am not a very objective observer here. For the last 5 years I have been emotionally invested with VRC program a lot and could only wish it to be successful.
However, if I was a total outsider and somebody gave me all the background information about the latest dynamics, my outlook would be pessimistic. Just judging by the way the feedback flows through the system it doesn’t look very healthy or stable. If there is a perfect storm of economic downturn, prolonged import tariffs, and persistent unresolved issues with V5, I wouldn’t be surprised if VEX and VRC fold in a couple of years. This is just my non-expert opinion and I sincerely wish to be wrong here, because both VRC and V5 hardware platform have some unique and exciting elements that cannot be found anywhere else. However, there are still significant risks associated with both that could result in irreversible damage if not dealt with promptly.
I am not an expert in crisis management and not in the position to give any advise, but if you accept my point of view for the rest of this post, you may gain some interesting insights or, at least, look at this from an alternative angle:
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Even if legal department says you should keep everything under a tight NDA, making beta program forum and user feedback closed was a mistake. If the forums were open and allowed additional external expertise, that would cost nothing extra, but could potentially help and save V5 from disastrous rollout. It is still not to late to be more open about current V5 challenges and get some advice from the community.
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Having beta program and then ignoring important complaints because, allegedly, it was too costly to delay production, makes very little sense. Have the risk assessment analysis been done for any of the user feedback items? In hindsight, it should be obvious that not doing proper risk assessment or not accepting its conclusions, will always cost more money in the long term.
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Structuring Trade-In program such that you have to send old working hardware for destruction, even before new hardware was manufactured and tested, screams panic to anyone who is even remotely familiar with Murphy’s law. And putting it in more anthropomorphic terms - all problems with V5 hardware were caused by the curse that still functional Cortex units sent back in time as they were/will be dying in the shredder. You can laugh at me all day long, but if you treat with compassion not only your fellow human beings, but also the hardware that you depend on, it will pay you back with gratitude and save your back when it will matter the most. Donate traded-in Cortex units to the schools that cannot afford new hardware and you will see your bad fortunes turn around.
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There have been a lot of things said about BO1 vs BO3 in this thread. There have been even more things said on the other social platforms at the time when the change was announced. Some of them I am not even going to repeat and some of them were of the kind that BO1 was done not only because EPs asked for that, but primarily to give ESPN a format that is better suited for the TV special. Whether it is true or not there is clearly a trust issue with students thinking that RECF does not have their best interest in mind. This is a very serious concern that needs to be addressed.
There is nothing wrong with repeating explicitly and frequently that RECF treats students’ concerns seriously and its primary objective is to help kids grow kind, confident, and learn the skills for the future, with everything else being the distant secondary objectives.
By the existence of this thread one would assume that RECF is already considering the idea of change to the tournament format, but the key would be to act quickly and decisively to allow States and other World Qualifiers the flexibility to apply BO3, or even recommend one of the proposed solutions as the default format. That would cost next to nothing to RECF, but could instantly repair a lot of damage dealt to VEX/VRC brand in the recent months.
I would conjecture that if BO3 is back before the next worlds qualifying event then the future of VEX/VRC brand is bright and certain, but with every event running under the strict BO1 rules, the probability of VEX going under in the next two years would increase by 1 percentage point, and if Worlds 2019 run under BO1 - by 30 percentage points. It is not an accurate metric, but it is here to illustrate the idea of how these relationships work within the systems with complex and sometimes irrational entities.
