Fixed that for you! Look it has been about two years since we had a full scale event at our venue, it frankly was rough. Teams were great, they all got their 6 QMs in and it was a good day all in all… but for me not to be able to start matches on schedule and be 35 minutes behind schedule was rough and I learnt to recalibrate my expectations. I am super glad to have in-person events again here.
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I don’t know if it’s worse that I did the research to know that or that I knew that before you even posted about it.
Sorry for the harsh use of words which I assume is what you were correcting. But yeah that’s probably better wording. However I think McBride would have had it under control given that this isn’t the first competition they’ve hosted as far as I know.
I assume that another team went to this competition and posted here before me. Or you yourself where there.
Nope, but we are cluttering the thread and should move to PMs to continue.
Speaking as someone who helps run the events at McBride, the event in question did indeed have field control issues. It was an unfortunate time for that to happen because this event in particular was rescheduled on short notice, resulting in it being extremely short staffed, with the only two people truly experienced in running events being the event partner and head referee. We has also hosted an event the day before, where there were no field control issues on the exact same fields, which was why this new malfunction was unexpected. But as soon as issues were reported, we did have someone watching that field controller, and when issues were confirmed to exist, that match was replayed and the field controller was swapped out for another one, which as far as I am aware, fixed the issues. But to be sure, we ran semifinals and finals matches on the other field.
It’s a difficult situation for so few people to run an event on such short notice, and while it’s understandable to feel frustration as a competitor due to field control issues, and it might be easy to complain about the people running the events, just know that without them there would have been no event at all.
But yes, field control issues are frustrating, both for competitors and volunteers, and they seem to be quite a common issue with tournaments. Hopefully the new field control method that will be introduced at worlds this year will have less failure points and will be less prone to failure and malfunction.
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I was actually about to bring this up. I just remembered this event had been rescheduled. I also didn’t intended to put down the event volunteers either, it wasn’t their fault, just thought it could have been handled better.
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One team came to the queue tables and just pushed our robot off the table.
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Does the losing team get SP equivalent to their own score also, or does only the winning alliance earn SP? I apologize if this is written somewhere; I’m in IQ, so I haven’t thoroughly read VRC rules.
All teams in the match get SP equal to the score of the losing alliance.
(Exceptions: If it’s a tie, they get the tied score, and a team that’s DQ’d gets zero in everything. I think if both opponents are DQ’d, the winning alliance gets their own score as SP’s.)
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That team literally almost sneak 100’ed us as we had a skirmish under the ramp for like half the match. And when the drove off, they had left it right underneath it to were it looked like we did it. Good thing i could speech 100 ourselves out of it.
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Indeed, you convinced like, six different refs to give us the points.
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What irks me the most of all is when the refs don’t know the rules. I despise it so much I plan on bringing troublesome rules to the attention of the Head Ref for State before the tournament so he can apply rules correctly to everyone. I have such a strong sense of justice that I once tried to tell the ref that a ball our partner had scored didn’t count because it was touching a robot (I’m in IQ). I started to say, “A ball counts if part of it is in the Low Goal [this ball was] but not if it’s touching a robot [also was],” but the Ref only heard me out to, “A ball counts if part of it is in the Low Goal,” so she totalled our points too high even though I tried to correct her.
The only other things anywhere close is once our sister team got paired with a really bad team right at the end so we didn’t get paired with them (pairing is automatic in IQ) and got paired instead with a team with a herobot they didn’t know how to drive and that once the judges gave an award to literally last place.
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Our auton ran and a bit flip or a glitch occurred, and the auton skipped over the line of code that put the lift down. I had limiter code on our robot, so you couldn’t move it back UP if it was already down in the beginning of the match. So we lost that match horribly as we only had one lift, which was broken, and a bad partner. That made me livid because I didn’t do anything and we tested the same auton six times after and it worked fine but it only didn’t work then.
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What makes me angry is that i went to a leauge yesterday and when picking alliances, one of the prostigesous teams came over and talked to my schools other team (the teams leader is my best friend). my other team is in 2nd place and there in 5th so they asked if they could alliance. my friend said sure that would be great. he was very excited. 5 minutes later when he got up and picked the team that asked to alliance, they declined. so that left my friend out on dry land for he hadnt talked to any other alliance since he thought it was a done deal. he ended up picking the next one in line, a team that knew nothing about there bot and could basically spin in circles. they lost. (btw, the school who was hosting, their judges ended up giving all the awards to ethier MS or HS of that school {except one judges award}. the school ended up with 7 throphies. from winning their own competition. kinda suspicious, dont you think?)
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When the other team stuck a mobile goal under our ramp so we could not get on and because that was in the eliminations that is supposed to be an automatic DQ but did not see it.
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That was really annoying.
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Almost the exact thing happened to me. My team and my sister team in quarter finals were facing two teams that both hoarded and pinned my sister team. It was so clearly hoarding/pinning and there were three refs watching the entire time. It took them a good ten minutes to talk it over and figure out that they were pinning and hoarding. It was pretty ridiculous that it took that long for them to figure it out. So we ended up winning thankfully by DQ. To be fair, it was the only tournament they had held all year, but still. Also, in another match the same tournament, this one team’s controller stopped working before the match and they decided to not show up and so I sprinted over to get one of them to come and so they weren’t a no show. Then, we almost won, but due to pure chance, we weren’t able to balance as a goal somehow hooked itself on our chassis. So we almost won a 2v1. Thankfully (but not really), the opposing alliance white screened in the last five seconds and we got to replay the match over (we lost smh). But that tournament was so tiring because I ran back and forth trying to get our alliance partners to the matches because they never knew they were up. I know they are trying their best, but still. I’m a high schooler and I can do this stuff better than these adults.
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Yea some stuff like that happens. I was paired with a team who didn’t have any driving experience and didn’t know how to code or what the Win Point was, but they had a really good intake system and fourbar.
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Having been in those referee scrums, everybody is super cautious that they are making the right “Final Decision”. I’d rather get snarked at for taking extra time to get it right vs “ref took three seconds to make the wrong decision”
Awesome, forward this to your local EP, we all love to have additional help.
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