I’m sure that whenever it was obvious who had gotten the most points, they wouldn’t bother tallying. (That’ll happen a lot until everyone has good scoring autonomous routines.) Also, most of the time I believe the “accidental” dropping of the preloaded sacks wasn’t so accidental, but a very simple, quick way to get a point in Autonomous.
~Jordan
Programming Skills Parked – A robot is considered to be Programming Skills Parked if it is touching one of its own Alliance Starting Tiles at the end of the Match, and has left the Alliance Starting Tile during the Programming Skills Match.
If they just stayed on the tile, they wouldn’t get the 10 points. They would have to move off and back on again.
You’d think some of the more advanced teams would’ve made more advanced autonomous routines.
Yes, it was being scored incorrectly. I brought this up, but I suppose that the manual which they had printed out at the event was an older version? Because they read the manual to make sure, so I (unfortunately) did not check my Sack Attack App which was up-to-date. There are usually a few things that are not done exactly as they are supposed to at a tournament this early (first of the year for everyone attending, and overall). However, this year I believe that the rules were simple enough such that we only had one or two of these mistakes, rather than more which I remember from Gateway. The event volunteers did a great job. 
~Jordan
I was planning on it, but somehow did not end up with 4-wire cables for the IEM’s. I did see one team (I do not remember which) who looked like they had a quite sophisticated one compared to the rest of ours, but unfortunately it did not perform as it was supposed to.
~Jordan
The Programming Skills Challenge Rules have not been updated since they were released at the VRC World Championship. All updates to Manual documents cam be found here:
That is strange. I did not get a chance to read the manual paper which they were reading, but I was assured that it only said that the robot had to be parked at the end, and nothing more. Oh well. We’ll make sure it is correct for next time around. There were no Skills Challenge awards given out.
~Jordan
Maybe he read it wrong. At one Gateway tournament, one of the programming skills refs made up a bogus rule making it illegal to reposition a robot while it was touching a game object. That tournament was very disorganized, so I wouldn’t be surprised if those refs had not read the rules very well.
That might have been us. We actually do have an auton that can score 40 points in autonomous, but it didnt work because the colored tiles, which we dont have access to, messed with the calibration of the line trackers.
Because it didnt work, we changed our autonomous to grab two bonus sacks.
Being one of the refs at the tournament I can answer to why we did not appear to really been tallying up the points in autonomous. As to most of the matches, the beginning would show not many people using their preload to score with and as the matches went on during the day, teams would be using the preloads for dropping them on the tile as their robots go forward in autonomous. There would be cases where we could tell that red alliance scored one or two game pieces on the tile and the same with blue. There was the occasional team that would have us go over to see which of the game objects were scored but there were no very close scoring to the point where tallying was required.