WARNING: RANT INCOMING
And once again, WARNING RANT INCOMING
Yesterday was the Virginia FVC Championship event in Farmville, Va. The FVC program is still young, and this is the first year with these Vex "Championship Events" littering the country and also the real "FVC Championship" in Atlanta requiring teams to qualify at one of these smaller championships. Ok, good idea, nice concept, let's see how it works. I like the thought of a tiered system, its probably the future of FIRST as a whole.
Here's the real problem, VirginiaFIRST. VirginiaFIRST has been mired with problems and inefficiencies whenever we have interacted with them before, I wonder why they felt they could pull this off. The competition started behind schedule, and never caught up. Some of it was field malfunctions. Part of it was the team's fault for not getting inspected early enough to make it to the field on time (we tried to, but kept getting cut ahead of by teams that were needed on the field earlier than us, so we were late as well to our first Qual match). But VirginiaFIRST could have resolved that by forcing teams to pass inspection before practice matches instead of just Q matches (because you can easily run practice matches without a team on the field, it wont hurt their overall standing, etc). Or you could just be tougher on the teams and say, tough luck, get inspected earlier. But finishing THREE HOURS LATE is not allowable. Especially when teams came from 3-4 hours away from all around the state, you cannot finish a competition at 8:30 at night.
Then there was the mistake that changed the results of the competition. They fucked up the alliance selection, BIG TIME. In 2006, FRC implemented a serpentine draft (1-8, 8-1, like fantasy sports, where the 8th team gets two selections in a row), but FVC still uses a straight draft (1-8, 1-8, the #1 seed gets the first selection of both rounds). In Farmville, they used a serpentine. Sure, the #1 alliance may still have won in the end (in fact, using the straight probably would have made it easier for them to win), but it would have changed who their 3rd alliance partner was, and therefor who gets a spot at the FVC Championship in Atlanta. Or it could have potentially changed who won the competition as a whole. This mistake has no excuse, it's plain stupidity. It's one that could have been potentially disastrous if more people than just me and a few high-ups in VaFIRST realized that the serpentine was a mistake.
Additionally, there were only 3 Qualifying rounds per team. Most FVC tournaments dont have many more than this, and with the 29 teams there, I can understand why. But Toronto had 24 and 4 round per team, etc. 3 is way too few, but that really isn't VaFIRSTs fault.
As for FVC 116's performance, it was okay. We ended up being the team shafted by the serpentine, which makes it even closer to my heart (we were the 9th pick, and thus a member of the 8th alliance, who starts against the 1st alliance in the QFs). We had some technical issues, and couldn't really ever get our herder working properly (which is a shame, because the arm and delivery systems worked tremendously, if we could have reloaded them effectively, we could have been among the elite teams at the competition). Additionally, our alliance partners scored a total of only 8 points during the qualification rounds (which we went 1-2 in). Delaware does look promising though, especially if an effective herder can be added.
Additionally, we won the Connect Award. Unlike last year (when we won Connect at Duluth), Connect is no longer an autonomous award (which we could have been contenders for again if it was), but now it is an outreach award. That is a promising sign for our FRC Chairman's effort as well. We didn't win Inspire (closest thing to Chairman's in FVC), but I'm not terribly concerned with that. Inspire is partially done through a vote by teams, and we didn't get out to enough teams. Additionally it includes part of the robot design, and 3065 faired better in competition than we did (plus I know they have an outstanding program, as I believe they are linked with FRC 1033).
Yesterday was the Virginia FVC Championship event in Farmville, Va. The FVC program is still young, and this is the first year with these Vex "Championship Events" littering the country and also the real "FVC Championship" in Atlanta requiring teams to qualify at one of these smaller championships. Ok, good idea, nice concept, let's see how it works. I like the thought of a tiered system, its probably the future of FIRST as a whole.
Here's the real problem, VirginiaFIRST. VirginiaFIRST has been mired with problems and inefficiencies whenever we have interacted with them before, I wonder why they felt they could pull this off. The competition started behind schedule, and never caught up. Some of it was field malfunctions. Part of it was the team's fault for not getting inspected early enough to make it to the field on time (we tried to, but kept getting cut ahead of by teams that were needed on the field earlier than us, so we were late as well to our first Qual match). But VirginiaFIRST could have resolved that by forcing teams to pass inspection before practice matches instead of just Q matches (because you can easily run practice matches without a team on the field, it wont hurt their overall standing, etc). Or you could just be tougher on the teams and say, tough luck, get inspected earlier. But finishing THREE HOURS LATE is not allowable. Especially when teams came from 3-4 hours away from all around the state, you cannot finish a competition at 8:30 at night.
Then there was the mistake that changed the results of the competition. They fucked up the alliance selection, BIG TIME. In 2006, FRC implemented a serpentine draft (1-8, 8-1, like fantasy sports, where the 8th team gets two selections in a row), but FVC still uses a straight draft (1-8, 1-8, the #1 seed gets the first selection of both rounds). In Farmville, they used a serpentine. Sure, the #1 alliance may still have won in the end (in fact, using the straight probably would have made it easier for them to win), but it would have changed who their 3rd alliance partner was, and therefor who gets a spot at the FVC Championship in Atlanta. Or it could have potentially changed who won the competition as a whole. This mistake has no excuse, it's plain stupidity. It's one that could have been potentially disastrous if more people than just me and a few high-ups in VaFIRST realized that the serpentine was a mistake.
Additionally, there were only 3 Qualifying rounds per team. Most FVC tournaments dont have many more than this, and with the 29 teams there, I can understand why. But Toronto had 24 and 4 round per team, etc. 3 is way too few, but that really isn't VaFIRSTs fault.
As for FVC 116's performance, it was okay. We ended up being the team shafted by the serpentine, which makes it even closer to my heart (we were the 9th pick, and thus a member of the 8th alliance, who starts against the 1st alliance in the QFs). We had some technical issues, and couldn't really ever get our herder working properly (which is a shame, because the arm and delivery systems worked tremendously, if we could have reloaded them effectively, we could have been among the elite teams at the competition). Additionally, our alliance partners scored a total of only 8 points during the qualification rounds (which we went 1-2 in). Delaware does look promising though, especially if an effective herder can be added.
Additionally, we won the Connect Award. Unlike last year (when we won Connect at Duluth), Connect is no longer an autonomous award (which we could have been contenders for again if it was), but now it is an outreach award. That is a promising sign for our FRC Chairman's effort as well. We didn't win Inspire (closest thing to Chairman's in FVC), but I'm not terribly concerned with that. Inspire is partially done through a vote by teams, and we didn't get out to enough teams. Additionally it includes part of the robot design, and 3065 faired better in competition than we did (plus I know they have an outstanding program, as I believe they are linked with FRC 1033).