I, so far, have had no real ‘strange’ things that happened, but figured it’d be cool to see what you all had to say about that.
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#2 seed gets rejected 6 times
Field not set at all before match start (they replayed it once they realized)
Team’s robot literally splits in half
3 Turning Point flags cracked in one tournament
Robot gets stuck under Turning Point platform
Team that wasn’t even signed up for a tournament shows up and tries to compete
Match schedule printed wrong with only 4 teams on it
Those are the best ones that I have seen at my tournaments, but I know there have been weirder ones.
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Excalibur?
20 characters
I’ve seen 4th seed go down the line and get rejected 4-5 times, people building their robots at the competition, arms and wheels falling off, basically just Southern New England moments.
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No, it was a tournament in TP. I forget which one and which team.
When literally every single elimination match was an upset. 8 beat 1. 7 beat 2. 6 beat 3. 5 beat 4. 8 beat 5. 7 beat 6. 8 beat 7.
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Tournament manager not recording scores and breaking almost every match. Then it worked perfectly through finals
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Happy Cake Day @9MotorGang! Eat some cake!
Alright so now I have to come up with something strange to keep on topic… How about when we were the blue alliance and our teammate started loading rings into the red goal? (To take nothing away from them. They were very nice people.)
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#2 seed gets rejected 6 times
— Seen this as a strategy to break possible alliances apart. #3 and #4 want to get together, did the pinky swear and everything. So #2 asks 4 and they say no, but then #3 and 4 are stuck. Of all the rules in VRC, this is one of my favorites. It’s the one that I drill all of my roboteers on and one that I make sure is explicitly pointed out before alliance selection. Last big time was 2009 Worlds when someone smoked all the China teams so they couldn’t pair up. In recent history only a two or three team decline. OTOH I’ve seen early season matches with not great robots and only a few qualification matches that a clawbot was the #2 seed.
Field not set at all before match start (they replayed it once they realized)
– Yep, seen this in VRC and VIQ
Team’s robot literally splits in half
– Seen major components come off, always sad to see a wheel spin off. But my favorite was the on fire battery.
Turning Point Flags breaking
— I’ve seen the flags break and the pole break. And the field elements being fragile is entirely my fault. I complained incandescently about the metal ladder, it weighed a ton had to be moved as a unit, etc. Since then, game elements have been smaller / lighter.
Robot gets stuck under Turning Point platform
— Turning point AND Tipping Point and the amazing one was getting stuck onto the Elevation center platform
Team that wasn’t even signed up for a tournament shows up and tries to compete
— So many times. “We are on the wait list, where do we wait?” The (worst) was an event on an active Airbase where you not only had to sign up but supply ID for the team adults and a list of the roboteers. Team showed up having done none of that.
Match schedule printed wrong with only 4 teams on it
— Umm as an EP I printed wrong schedules off. I had been doing a demo of TM, so I was in a dummy event to show how to queue and run matches. Came time to Print, I forgot to connect back to the real event, but did the Dummy event. Lucky for me I had team “Thomas Tank”, “Buzz Lightyear”, “Dad’s Oldsmobile”,“Batmobile” so I was able to see the error before they got too far. But it’s one of the reason I don’t do printed schedules any longer.
One of my favorites was the roboteer that showed up to drive with safety glasses on, safety glasses on top of their head and a pair dangling by a lanyard. I asked the mentor what was up with that and got told the driver was notorious for not having glasses, so that’s how they made sure.
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For me it was #1 seed get rejected 6 times.
When we (the 9 seed) beat the 1 seed.
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A tournament allowing a 2v1 in bracket for the fun of it, and the 1-team alliance beat the 2-team alliance.
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Yes … Building robots at the competition.
There’s nothing like attempting to build a working four bar and pneumatic clamp in an hour.
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In Tower Takeover, our controller got bricked by the field control during a tournament. Not only did it freeze, but it also couldn’t turn off, even with the little button on the back that usually hard resets it. It stayed on for over 24 hours before it ran out of battery and returned back to its normal behavior. Thankfully, we had a second controller with us, so it only affected one of our matches.
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cough Anjo cough
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This was a scrimmage and not an actual match, but we were playing and the other alliance just… balanced our platform. We had like 3 goals on the unbalanced platform, and the opponents just came up, righted the platform, and left. I don’t know why it was so confusing to me, but it just doesn’t make sense!!
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That also makes it easy to ensure everyone on the drive team has goggles.
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If they thought they would win, maybe they were trying to give you extra points so they could get more SP’s (Strength of Schedule Points), which are equal to the score of the losing team and are the next tiebreaker after AP’s. (They used to be the main tiebreaker until Nothing But Net in 2016.)
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I feel this is something that happens fairly often with other teams, but there was one year we had accidentally gotten one of our alan keys caught between a C channel in the chassis and the wheel.
I get that, but they straight up lost because of it. It wasn’t an official match, just a practice one, so maybe it was just for fun? I still don’t know.
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