This is one of the first questions I am going to put on the Q&A - because even though you can’t descore an opponent’s stack, it kind of looks like you can descore your own:
<SG5> Robots may not intentionally or accidentally, indirectly or directly, remove Cones from an
opponent’s Stack.
It would make sense that you could descore your own - especially near the end of a match if you want to redistribute cones in order to have all your stacks higher than your opponent’s. So, in actuality, there might be a lot of descoring. I can also see stacking a bunch of cones on a goal then moving it over to the goal zone then redistributing cones to other goals.
@Silicon That’s not exactly the point I was trying to make. I meant that, if implemented, it could become a very important strategic tool, even if a lot of the points are determined at the end of the match
This is actually why I would want the system to have a large degree of inaccuracy. So that players cant rely on it and have to use their own brains. One of the interesting parts of the game is how close to a tie will you make the game in the name of SPs. This aspect would be ruined by an accurate system.
I think vex will almost certainly try to implement it because they are trying to become more audience friendly, and it is often hard to tell who is winning in these games if you have no idea what is going on, and a small inaccuracy means nothing to the audience.
Tournament Manager will support real time scoring, as it has the past couple of years. It is up to the Event Partners to use it or not depending on event setup, technological competence, and volunteer availability.
It will be built into tm, just a matter of having someone punch it in. For crossover this year it actually worked really well. I think the live scores stop showing for the last few seconds.
For the highest stack in each zone, I don’t think the refs won’t be doing that until all objects come to rest. They could count the total comes stacked, and the mobile cones in each zone.
The live scores will always be an estimate. I had a really good ref that did it well and other refs that just used pencil and paper.
Check out the vrc hub app to see how the scoring will work. You have auto winner, highest in each zone, total cones, mobile in each zone, and parking. There mobile bases and total cones will be the ones that you can do real time scoring with.
I hope TM uses per-zone scoring of Stacked Cones rather than the way it is implemented in VRC Hub. That would allow Highest Stack calculation to be computerized.
I’m assuming it’s a number-of-volunteers thing, and live scoring is one of the least-critical aspects of the competition. During NbN worlds they got absolutely wrecked for using referees for the live scoring and I’m assuming they took a step back and made sure that they put more emphasis on the fundamentals for Starstruck worlds.
To everyone saying live scoring Starstruck was hard, it wasn’t. At least for us (admittedly with our own system) it wasn’t. We had 3 people live scoring each match (could have been two people but we had the extra volunteers so why not make it easier). And they just lay on the ground watching the projector screens using orange cubes for pillows.
I will most likely be making our own version again this season for In The Zone. I just tend to wait until after we get a handle on what the most effective UI will be.
We also always make it clear that the live score is NOT a final score or necessarily accurate. If a team tries to go crazy on SP using the live score then that’s their own fault.
The scoring interface is similar to Hub: for each alliance, the referee enters the number of cones stacked, the number of goals scored in each zone, and the number of highest stacks. It’s much easier for a referee to count up all of the items and only enter a few numbers than it is to enter the location of and number of cones on each goal.
I already do so actually, I am one of the local EPs for my area. I just always want to run better events and keep progressing with them.
Hopefully in our state I can convince them to move to tablet scoring and livestreaming this year (already have the camera setup, just need the network with enough bandwidth to handle streaming 4 different events).