I’ve recently been noticing that q&a questions are getting less and less answers, some are starting to get tags of 1month, and still no answer (which is annoying, because they say to ask the questions before your events, but at this rate you might ask a question a month before regionals, and you won’t get an answer until after) - and one of the events we attended attempted to DQ us based on a ruling that could not be found, or justified in the game manual.
In such events, where there may be a gray area (such as possession counts in certain situations), what is supposed to happen when the ruling is up to interpretation? One of our teams received a DQ, but we could not find the ruling in the game manual, and once we brought it up to the ref, they reversed the ruling (which was more frustrating than anything else). In the game manual, there was a significant grey area, about whether or not an opponent was causing the robot to violate a rule. In this instance, we were told not to partake in the strategy, and we lost the next round due to a dc (this ruling was not match affecting). However; if the robot had let’s say, been using that strategy as a crucial part of their game plan, or had designed their robot around a concept which was not yet defined, and competed with it under the assumption that it was legal, as there has been no official answer from the q&a forum, would the refs be justified in DQ’ing the robot for such actions? Or say, if we had lost that match because of that ruling, what would we do then?
That is to say, is a ref allowed to make up his/her own rules at a competition? Is a ref allowed to take the rules and “interpret” them to fit the situation?
If a situation seems ambiguous and you are not sure whether it is legal or not, and you are waiting on an official response, it seems foolish to base your entire design and strategy on it.
After an event.
Once the ref says that is the ruling, then that is the ruling. It does not matter if VEX/RECF later decide to make your strategy legal. It was the ref’s call during the tournament. The end.
What is also true about the Q&A forum, is that there are, at least one, if not more, questions about a rule that has already been answered. For example, there is a question about the 36" expansion which had already been answered.
New Question
Answered Question
There are possibly more, just happened to see these.
It deals with a different scenario that the first question does. In the second question, there is no horizontal slice that would fail the test. I posted that question after a thread with a good number of detailed posts where we couldn’t come to any kind of conclusion as to how to use the tool.
With that said, it’s a mess. They could sorry it by rule, and they should delete posts that do not confirm to the rules of the q and a.
In a case where no rule exists, then G1 exists to patch things up until it becomes an official ruling, at least. By posting a question on the VEX forum unofficially, you are using the most common response from the public as a temporary rule for G1, or better yet ask a referee if something is legal or if they would allow it. If G1 is violated, the referee should most probably not go to an immediate Disqualification, but assess it and first ask if it’s ethical. If it is not ethical then they have every right to DQ, and if it’s not that’s when the interpretation of intentional/egregious or unintentional. If it’s intentional/egregious, then DQ, if not then it should come in to as if the G1 rule was match affecting is not. If it was not match affecting, then they should warn, and not DQ.
EDIT//: In addition, generally speaking many rulings in the past years get passed on to this year as a G1 common sense rule. If you ask the community, since many of us have years on us, we have a good knowledge of what would/wouldn’t be legal.
Unfortunately, you may want to ask who the head ref is for events before signing up, assuming you have been around a while and know who to avoid. The head ref and event partner have the final say, even if they misinterpret rules.