As an attempt to answer @323G_RIOT 's question, I do want to begin with that the tournament wasn’t run the very best it could’ve been. Also, two of the teams on the red alliance were fairly new to Vex, and it was the alliance captain’s first competition. With this said, I personally believe that with what you stated, it was unintentional and the way that the tourney was run, I believe that, viewing from the ref’s perspective, I would’ve made the same call. I’m sorry it turned out unfortunately for you. I, having probably more experience in this game than the ref (just assuming), wouldn’t have called it a violation, because the opposing alliance did pick it up, but do remember, they pushed it onto themselves. Weird, I know, but it is what happened.
P.S. I was not at the tourney, I’m just going off of the info I was given from our teams and your post, and I am also trying to answer form an unbiased point of view.
Well you never actually addressed the issue in question (whether or not the possession of opponent mobile goals was illegal or not). Personally, I don’t think it is illegal. I never saw anything mentioning this in the rules or Q&A posts, and usually if something isn’t illegal, it’s legal by default.
Edit: OP edited their post to adress the issue
What I was going off of was in <SG6> it states that “Robots may not intentionally grasp, grapple or attach to any field elements or the opposing Mobile Goals.” I do believe that in this scenario, at least, the robot that picked up the mobile goal didn’t do so intentionally. I believe they were just trying to score the cone on the stationary goal. I wasn’t sure what it would be called if the referees thought it was unintentional.
I swear the rules this year is encouraging you kids to be lawyers not engineers.
Rules that make you determine intent and if something is match effecting is more than we should expect out of volunteer refs.
I watched this video several times both before posting it while editing, and after to try to figure out what was going on. I noticed they were trying to, or it appeared they were trying to drop that goal. However, I still lean on the side of this should have probably been a DQ.
There’s only one other case I have on film when a team picks up the other sides MG and it was breif… a whole minute is a lot. I’m interested in the ruling from vex on this matter.
In a competition last weekend, my daughter’s team was blue alliance. Early in the match, they picked up a red alliance mobile goal and started stacking on it. After getting two cones on, they suddenly realized the issue and put the mobile goal down, leaving the cones on the goal. They only had the goal for a few seconds, probably 15-20.
The red alliance happily picked up the mobile goal and scored it in a zone. My daughter’s team (32545A) won, so any rules infraction had the chance to be match-affecting. As it happens, the brief time they held the goal was a factor the ref cited in not DQing them. The Red alliance was able to get to the goal pretty soon after blue put it down.
Also, they didn’t unstack the cones after stacking them, since that would be even more rules violations.
Based on what that particular ref said, I’m pretty sure if they had held the goal for a considerable length of time, they would have drawn the DQ. As it was, everybody thought it was all pretty funny, really.
yeah this is a weird case. This team apparently had a MG carrier that couldn’t release what it held onto.
Allegedly they collected the blue MG by mistake, and couldn’t release it. They drove around with it for over a minute. I think if i were the ref i would have DQed them.
Wow. That’s tough. On the one hand, it didn’t look like the red team having the MG was match affecting. On the other hand, it was pretty eggregious. However, SG6 doesn’t say anything about eggregious offenses - it states that a DQ is only handed out when it is match affecting.
However, I do agree with ColdEdge - sometimes it is really hard to determine if something is match affecting. It requires refs to quickly do math in their heads. Plus, this early in the season, some refs are not as knowledgeable of the rules as they could be. At a tournament our teams were in last weekend, the refs leaned toward “not match affecting” in most cases and I don’t recall seeing one DQ.
So I may be slightly biased as I’m in the same robotics club as the offending robot, but it seems like it wasn’t intentional as they were trying to get it out of their robot and their robot wasn’t really designed for holding mogos (as shown by the fact that they couldn’t get it out). It’s just frustrating that the rules are so hard to enforce as many cases like this are up for referee discretion (my team ran into an issue in the semifinals where we got pinned against the 10pt barrier and there was a discussion on whether we should have been DQ’d or not, ultimately we didn’t get DQ’d because we couldn’t get out from behind the blue robot)
As @TheColdedge and @Gear Geeks said, “match affecting” is a tough call. In a Q&A, @Blatwell asked whether score was the only criteria for match affecting, or whether the lost time could also be considered. The official answer is the refs can also consider lost time.
The most important part about that is the allowance that something other than raw final score can be considered in the match affecting determination. Hopefully, they’ll apply that in other situations as well.
But here’s an example of a situation that a re-interpretation of “match affecting” won’t change: In a match video linked earlier in the season, it looked very clear that one robot knocked another over in a pretty purposeful way. The ruling at the competition was that the toppling wasn’t match affecting. It happened near the end of the match, and no points were scored or prevented; it simply couldn’t have shifted the winner.
The implication of that is basically anything goes if it doesn’t move the score. I don’t know if that’s what the GDC intended, but it sounds like a bad idea.
In the example I cited earlier, if the toppled robot was damaged in the fall and couldn’t compete in the next competition, the effect would have been real and detrimental, but still not “match affecting” in the match where it occurred. Some thought should be given to how such situations should be handled.
In the video which prompted @323G_RIOT’s question, it sure looks like a long time to hold on to an opposing mobile goal. I understand that it was accidental and that they were trying to dislodge the goal. While I understand the idea (but do not wholly agree) that blue was unlikely to outscore red even if the goal was available, I think that’s a troubling determination for a referee to have to make.
So we’re asking refs to figure out the intent of the driver as well as whether one team would have outscored another in a hypothetical match played in the ref’s head…
No joke, the rules this year are obnoxious. This tournament where this happened was filled with what I thought we’re troubling choices by the head reff, and they weren’t quickly made. We sat around for almost a half an hour twice while a group of mentors and the ref agonized over the rules.
The thing that bothers me most is that with this ambiguity with regards to match effecting and the nonsense ruling regarding time lost, we’re going to see a lot of close matches undergoing close scrutiny after the fact. I’ve noticed that typically the most vocal tend to get their way when challenging a ruling on the feild and it’s annoying to squeak out a close win to just immediately see people (usually parents) arguing for a teams disqualification.
I consider it a failure that there are so many ways to be DQed in this game.
I agree! At our tournament last weekend, there were multiple matches where parents and coaches were arguing for DQs or replays. That is only going to get worse as the season goes on. The rules need to be more black and white and not subject to interpretation and extrapolation (as Kypyro points out). Honestly, intentional or not, a robot should not be allowed to carry an opponent’s MoGo for so long. However, if you look at the rules, there’s really nothing in there that makes it a clear violation of the rules - and that’s the problem. The rule should state that it is illegal to pick up a MoGo and that the outcome is a DQ for the violating team. period.
As far as i know it is not legal during driver mode. However if say your autonomous goes horribly wrong and you end up grabbing one and scoring it somehow it wont count
