Where is the best place to suggest some improvements for Vex Worlds that aren’t necessarily part of the competition?
2 items of note:
When booking hotels through the worlds travel agent site, the listing of hotels did not indicate which were on the route for the shuttle. It would be super helpful in planning/booking hotel for teams to have that indicated on the hotel booking page.
I wonder who chooses or perhaps even tries the buffet food at Kentucky Kingdom for the team party.
I get that it can be a challenge to feed so many people quickly. I found this year’s offering to be particularly, “not good”. Would having an upgraded price for a half decent meal work? I didn’t take photos or am not offering a description.
I can say for the little $12 wristbands we got for food at Kentucky Kingdom… I couldn’t get a burger, fries and a drink and still had to pay about 40 cents extra.
By the time they figured out how to scan it where we ate, the food was cold. Ten minutes to get the food, ten more waiting for the cashier to put the money in the drawer (carefully turning each bill to face the right way of course) and then he finally scans my wristband and tells me “oh that will be 40 cents.”
What surprised me is that it was possible to book some of the hotels on the partner list, on the same dates, cheaper individually than through the supposed special group rate of gettravel.
At least for the Vex IQ dates, but IQ days were more expensive in general I think (I was there for both VRC and IQ and our daily rate on the last day was almost double of the first day…)
That’s down to each division’s production team. Some of said teams, based on what I observed, really don’t seem to care. Others try to keep reasonable volumes, but sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with changing audience volume levels, especially without being amidst the audience.
Most, if not all, production teams would turn down the volume if you just ask them to.
I would like to see more practice feilds, the queues were ridiculous on the morning of the second day and you were sharing a feild with four other teams, by the time you had got settled and ran maybe one test, the 10 minutes were up and it was time to go to the back of the queue. Obviously more feilds would push up the cost more so instead would it be possible for the match feilds in each division be available on the first days and morning of the second day, while no matches are on, that would really ease the pressure during the busiest times and would double the number of practice feilds avalible.
Actually, there was a positive aspect to that.
My team had the luxury of early inspection and plenty of unfettered access to the practice field on Wednesday between 1PM and 5ish, when most of the teams waited in the inspection line and no practice timing was done. Did they use the time wisely? No, they fooled around (but still managed to get the robot fixed after the transport). Then the pressure built up, field rotations started.
Of course their first 10 minute allotment went wasted with no real work done.
At the third lap (waiting 30 minutes), they worked together like never before - programmer, student coach, drivers:
Get to the field, reset it, prepare for the auton test. (first attempt running before the 10min countdown even started)
After the auton, drivers practiced a match-like run, while the programmer updated the code.
When the 1:45 time passed, the programmer started uploading the code changes (often takes looong time) while the rest of the crew resets the field for the next run.
Rinse and repeat.
Once they realized the scarcity of the fields and get used to the workflow, they could fit 4 match cycles in the 10min time allotment. I think they have learned and grown a bit
I quite like this post. I would comment that 10 minutes is a bit hard. I am seen other teams take a full minute to get off the field and imagine a 15 minute time limit might be better. The overhead time of loading in and out can take a lot of the total time.
The cycle time was more like 15 minutes. The 10 minute timer didn’t start before all new teams loaded into the space - If you weren’t the last in the batch, you often had more than 10 minutes of pure practice time.
Tuning programming skills runs was near impossible on the practice fields because you’d always be working around 1 or 3 additional robots depending on how busy things were. 5 teams scored above 70 points at worlds this year versus about 60 teams being >70pts in the global skills rankings. At worlds only 3 teams put all 8 mobile goals in zones.
Given the very short queues at skills fields and plenty of volunteers just standing around waiting for their next customer I think it would make sense to permit programming skills only practice on the official skills fields. Separate queue and lower priority than official runs of course. How about it RECF? Maybe we’ll see an uptick in programming skills interest?
A lot of teams were trying to use their skills scores to get into worlds and had robots built for skills… And they did not take their skills robots to worlds!
Divisional assignments are pseudorandom (in reality, highly predictable) with no inherent significance.
Divisions operate autonomously almost as tournaments in and of themselves.
Division champion alliances then compete against other division champions for round robin rankings – essentially qualification matches all over again, but for a much-culled herd.
Finally, the first- and second-ranked division champion alliances compete in the event-wide finals to determine the world champions.
Side note: Divisional assignments have absolutely no bearing on Skills.
