Proposal: allow a move limit for FMC

[Mollerz]

Competing, judging, scrambling, checking results to generate scorecards for the next rounds and so that competitors know that they've made it through for the next day, resolving incidents, announcing rounds, tracking down missing competitors etc.

There's plenty to do with a tight schedule. It's easier to focus on other things that need to get done so that the schedule works.

Personally for you I would hardly say competing since at the last competition you competed in two events. Dene competed in a few more but compared to how much myself and Daniel compete, you cannot really use this as an excuse.

As a delegate I don't think you should ever have to judge at a non-major competition. If you end up judging you are completely distracted from the rest of the competition that you should be delegating. Obviously if there is literally nobody else and you have to judge then I can agree with it. Daniel and myself rarely judge in a weekend. I usually judge the largest multi attempt, and Daniel will scramble/take results and oversee the rest of them, other than that I barely judge at all.

Again, same thing applies to scrambling, do you not have people capable of scrambling at all in Australia? The only time myself and Daniel have to scramble are for things like clock, where we scramble twice as fast as anyone else who can even scramble, apart from the odd person. The only thing I scrambled at the last UK competition was skewb final for 5-10 minutes, because I scramble fast and accurately, and it was added to the schedule on the day.

I also do 90%+ of the data entry for the UK competitions, and I still have plenty of time throughout the day to compete in every single event, do registration for competition, and oversee delegating for a majority of the time. Resolving incidents takes seconds usually, sometimes there will be a decision that might take a bit longer to figure out but for the most part it will not eat into any time. This also means printing scorecards for the next rounds and organising scorecards for future rounds, all of which are done by me.

Announcing rounds should not be done by a delegate in my opinion, this should be left to the organiser. Obviously at some competitions you will be the organiser but announcing rounds does not take more than a few seconds. Generally if I have to announce I will also announce every person in the group if they do not have set groups beforehand (Usually at big UK competitions we will set the groups beforehand so we just called "3x3 ROUND 1 GROUP 2" for example). But this hardly eats into my time.

I also do not think you should chase up competitors. It is not your job to make sure they are the ones ready to compete. You give them schedules, have them on the wall, make it available well before the competition even starts. They should know X event starts at Y time, if they miss it is their fault. In the UK we nearly always host all events at competitions, we run extremely tight schedules all the time. If someone is missing from a group and I do not see them in the room, I'll add them to the last group. If it comes for the last group and they still have not see they are competing, I will quickly scan the room, if I don't see them, tough they miss their event. If I see them I'll call them over. Again it's seconds of time. We delegates and organisers set everything up on a plate for them, at the weekend all they have to do is be there at the right time, put their cubes down, and solve. When you start actively chasing people down they will be like "Oh I don't have to worry about when X event starts, Tim will come and get me." What would you do if you had to chase up every single person for every event? The competition would never finish and you would literally have no time.

I'm not going to repeat the last paragraph of my last post, because you are fully aware of it. If you are having trouble with time for the weekend then you need to delegate responsibilities to other people, and the easiest way to do that is with judging/scrambling.

 

[Dene]

Lots of stuff

Ok so we do things differently here to how you do them. So what? We didn't exactly consider judging FMC scrambles to be a priority, so we put it to the side. Gives us more opportunity to focus on what's going on in the competition.

btw, we are the organisers for every competition here (sometimes with a bit of help for venue etc., but we always run the show on the day).

Also, in my opinion delegates should scramble more often than not, as this is our most vital job to keep an eye on.

 

[Mollerz]

Your sentence is ambiguous. If you are incapable of solving 4bld, then obviously you shouldn't attempt it (you should be disqualified as per A1c). If you are "incapable", as in haven't done it before, but know enough to get it right eventually, then it depends on circumstances whether you should be allowed to attempt it or not.

These kids who attempt FMC for a result are also "incapable" of doing it. I don't see it as any different. They know how to do FMC, but they just do CFOP solutions. I knew how to solve 4BLD, I just did not have a result.

I think this is quite possibly the most unfair thing anyone has said to me in a very long time. I would expect such comments from all these American kids that feel like it's their right, and not a privilege, to be able to go to competitions. But from you? That's disappointing...

Why do you think it is unfair? I understand everything behind organising competitions, and delegating competitions, so I am in some sort of position to make this statement. Given Tim's response, I believe you are not delegating roles to other members of the community enough as evident by this long response I have just made. When you hold a competition with lots of events with short breaks and little time for error, you should be prepared to do everything you signed up for, and that includes checking all FMC solutions. I'm going to repeat myself again, like you are doing for a few things, if you are struggling with time to check the FMC solutions, then get some trusted competitors to check the solutions with you, it will speed it up a lot. If there is no rush to check the solutions, then checking them in your own time after the competition should be expected. I remember at a competition, myself and Daniel took the FMC solutions to McDonalds after the day of competing to check the FMC solutions.

I don't think I've specifically said this but why does someone wanting a result make a mockery of the WCA? It's in the spirit of the WCA to encourage people to compete, even if they barely know how to compete it in. Having people compete for results in FMC is the least time-wasting of all as well, since it will be 60 minutes if you have 1 competitor, and it will be 60 minutes if you have 200 competitors. If you do not want to check solutions then do not hold FMC. Looking at your profile in particular, it looks like at San Francisco Open 2009, you competed in 3BLD just to get a success. If you were attempting to speedsolve it you would not have DNS'd your remaining 2 attempts, you would have tried to get faster.

Ok so we do things differently here to how you do them. So what? We didn't exactly consider judging FMC scrambles to be a priority, so we put it to the side. Gives us more opportunity to focus on what's going on in the competition.

btw, we are the organisers for every competition here (sometimes with a bit of help for venue etc., but we always run the show on the day).

Also, in my opinion delegates should scramble more often than not, as this is our most vital job to keep an eye on.

I understand that we do things differently, I'm highlighting those differences so maybe you can apply them to future competitions you may hold. If you decide that FMC solutions are not a priority and put it to the side then you have all the time in the world after the competition to check them, no problem.

For running the show at least, I recommend you start trusting your organisers and give them a go at running the show. On arrival we usually have a good idea of how to setup venues so we will of course help with that, we do not want it cramped and hard to move around, but once the setup is done we let them run it. If we feel like they are doing something slightly wrong, or need help, we will help and give them tips or whatever is needed to make it more relaxed for them.

When Daniel started delegating he did absolutely everything, then a few of us competitors started organising and left him to delegate, and he enjoys it so much more now there is a lot less stress. Since I now delegate as well, Daniel mostly sits in the back just overseeing everything, I do a lot of the results and back-end organisation, the organisers of the competition do all of the front end stuff, and all our competitions now usually run ahead of schedule, we have time for breaks, and it is much more relaxing for every person involved. And most importantly, Daniel can delegate.

Obviously for major championships you would want delegates scrambling/judging the whole time. For Euro 2014 we tried our best to make it so only delegates scrambled and judged, but for smaller local competitions this is just not viable. When we let new people, who have not scrambled before, scramble, we tend to watch over them to make sure they are following along and checking the scramble afterwards. After a couple of rounds they will have gauged how to do it, and we will have trust in them that they do it correctly from then onward. Daniel oversees a lot, and sometimes he will end up scrambling as well, if he does not think people are capable of scrambling he will not let them do it. At local competitions, if delegates scrambled everything, nothing else would get done.

 

[porkynator]

Something that I've just realized (I don't know if someone has already brought this up, forgive me if so):

Blaming people for using "just CFOP" in FMC solves is like blaming people for using "just LBL" in 3x3 speedsolves.

Not 100% in topic, but worth mentioning imho.

 

[Renslay]

Something that I've just realized (I don't if someone has already brought this up, forgive me if so):

Blaming people for using "just CFOP" in FMC solves is like blaming people for using "just LBL" in 3x3 speedsolves.

Not 100% in topic, but worth mentioning imho.

I agree.

 

[Tim Major]

I recommend you start trusting your organisers and give them a go at running the show.

Dene and Tim are always the organisers. Even if someone gets the venue and it says their name as an organiser, generally they do nothing at the competition, it's Dene+Tim and people like me who scramble/run/judge for most if not all of the day when not competing (I rarely get to warmup for events).

I think this is going quite off topic. One valid thing can be taken out of this, it is acceptable for competitors to help check solutions. In future I definitely volunteer Dene, as I'm sure Feliks and Jay would too. However all of this other talk is just natural differences in competitions hosted by different people on different continents. We have our ways of doing things, you have yours, neither are necessarily superior, and I don't see the relevance to the topic at hand. Due to the mostly negative feedback on this idea I doubt the proposal will be approved, but the last 20 posts have been mostly irrelevant to an FMC move cap.

 

[porkynator]

[...] We have our ways of doing things, you have yours, neither are necessarily superior, and I don't see the relevance to the topic at hand.[...]

Since yours is causing problems and theirs is not, I'd say their approach is superior.

 

[Dene]

Why do you think it is unfair?

You obviously don't have a clue what I have done, and still do for this community, so you have no right to comment on this matter any more.

If there is no rush to check the solutions, then checking them in your own time after the competition should be expected.

Why are you acting as if we have some sort of dispute about this? This is exactly what we planned (implicitly) right from the start. We never had any expectation of doing anything different. We were happy to dedicate time in the evening to marking FMC. We don't disagree on anything around this subject. It's just a thought that occurred to me while I was frustratingly going through solutions that are pretty irrelevant to the purpose of FMC.

I don't think I've specifically said this but why does someone wanting a result make a mockery of the WCA?

My comment was specifically referring to people doing things such as going for 69 moves every time, or trying to stop the timer at 9:59.99.

Looking at your profile in particular, it looks like at San Francisco Open 2009, you competed in 3BLD just to get a success. If you were attempting to speedsolve it you would not have DNS'd your remaining 2 attempts, you would have tried to get faster.

It was my first ever competition, I was new and extremely naive. Looking back now, I should never have done that attempt, nor been allowed to. It was unfair to Lucas, considering his competition was so big for the time and falling behind. And it was unnecessary for me to do it, because I didn't care too much about bld and I wasn't good at all. However I had been practising bld in the weeks leading up to it and I thought I would give it a shot. I was the very last person to go (I can't exactly remember, but I have a feeling someone persuaded me to try), and I was happy to have a success and leave it at that.

Incidentally, despite the theory that some people are bandying about, I didn't pursue an interest in bld at all after having that success in my first attempt. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, but I just think it's a really weak argument.

For running the show at least, I recommend you start trusting your organisers and give them a go at running the show.

I already told you, we organise every competition.

When Daniel started delegating he did absolutely everything, then a few of us competitors started organising and left him to delegate, and he enjoys it so much more now there is a lot less stress. Since I now delegate as well, Daniel mostly sits in the back just overseeing everything, I do a lot of the results and back-end organisation, the organisers of the competition do all of the front end stuff, and all our competitions now usually run ahead of schedule, we have time for breaks, and it is much more relaxing for every person involved. And most importantly, Daniel can delegate.

That's good and well, but obviously this all depends on other people taking on that leadership role. We have people that have been with us from the start (such as Tim Major and Feliks) that have always helped a lot, but both were young back then and didn't take on a leadership role. In the past couple of years in particular Feliks' dad has taken on data entry and announcing duties a lot more. But ultimately, no one has put their hand up to truly take over control of a competition yet. Perhaps a lot of that has to do with me and Tim doing such a good job of running things so no one sees any need...

Anyway, I'm not sure if you're explicitly referencing ausnats when you talk about having time for breaks and stuff, but I feel like saying: usually we have time for breaks, but as far as I'm concerned time for breaks is time for more events. Running ahead of schedule is just bad scheduling (which can happen, as it can be very unpredictable, for example at ausnats we ended up well ahead of schedule).


idk why I'm still responding to this. None of it is relevant to the point at hand, so let me quote something I said earlier and how about you give a good response to it.

Let's try this from another angle. Imagine someone who doesn't know how to solve a cube blindfolded. What if they were to submit 10 cubes for multibld, and spend an hour on the side pretending to memorise and solve these 10 cubes. At the end of the hour they take off the blindfold with nothing solved and find the whole situation rather amusing. Even if they weren't wasting needed resources, I doubt many people (other than all the other childish people) would find this behaviour acceptable. They're having a joke at the expense of all the hard work people are putting into hosting a competition for them.

If we wouldn't allow people to make a mockery of what we do in any other event, why do we accept it for FMC? There needs to be a balance between having fun, and having a competition. If you aren't someone that "does" multibld, why should anyone be forced to spend their time watching you muck around? If you aren't someone that "does" FMC, why should anyone spend even a second giving you the time of day?

Since yours is causing problems and theirs is not, I'd say their approach is superior.

There aren't any problems. How has this not been clear? Seriously what are people reading when they are reading my posts? I can't comprehend where all the confusion is coming from.

 

[qqwref]

I don't agree with a lot of what Dene is saying (it's unnecessarily harsh to less skilled cubers), but I do think we should allow organizers to set a move limit in FMC, just as we allow them to set time limits in speedsolving events. It makes sense just for consistency's sake, regardless of how much time it actually saves. Similarly, an organizer should be able to set a minimum cubes limit in multiBLD, so someone who doesn't even have the potential of, say, 6 points cannot compete. All of these things already have official limits (80 moves, 10 minutes, 2 cubes) so we are just giving organizers the flexibility to adjust these if they want to.

 

[kinch2002]

Enough of the hostility between countries please Time to find solutions, not to blame each other for being rubbish

'For consistency's sake' is a decent argument for allowing it imo. I don't really have a problem with it being allowed, but I simply can't see the need to ever use it. Indeed 20 second hard cutoff for every solve is allowed in 3x3, but we never use that because the negatives outweigh the positives. I think there must be better solutions to this problem for Australia.

If Dene and Tim are really snowed under with work, I would humbly suggest that you should find organisers who actually organise
I struggled with this problem for a long time in the UK - even when I wasn't officially an organiser I sometimes felt like I was the only organiser at the competition. I think continuing like this for a while only served to ingrain it in the minds of everyone that I would take care of everything and it didn't help the situation. We have managed to get away from it a bit now, by stressing to 'organisers' (venue-finders) that they do need to run the competition as well. I still work all day pretty much (I try to take a break during multibld), but I generally manage to restrict myself to scrambling and other random important stuff (inc. marking FM), rather than constantly having to watch how the competition is running, chasing people, chasing judges etc.

 

[porkynator]

There aren't any problems. How has this not been clear? Seriously what are people reading when they are reading my posts? I can't comprehend where all the confusion is coming from.

"Since you think you, with your approach, need a new regulation while they, with their approach, are fine with things as they are, I'd say their approach is better."

Fine?

Btw, I think that if you are suggesting a new regulation implies that for you, currrently not having that regulation is a problem.

 

[TimMc]

Personally for you I would hardly say competing since at the last competition you competed in two events.

Thanks

If you end up judging you are completely distracted from the rest of the competition that you should be delegating.

Judges just stand next to a table and wait for runners to bring puzzles in covers to them. If scrambling is slow then judges are standing around waiting.

It's easier for one delegate to judge when there's another delegate at the competition.

Again, same thing applies to scrambling, do you not have people capable of scrambling at all in Australia?

There are some really good scramblers in Australia. But we can't expect them to scramble all the time. If conditions are going to be fair then the fast scramblers (fastest cubers in the world) should be in the same group and use the same scrambles for the final.

I also do 90%+ of the data entry for the UK competitions

Thankfully fazdad has been volunteering his time to do this. I still double check the results while competitors walk up and interrupt to ask whether they've made it to the next round or to find out what their average was, or to take a photo of their scorecard, or to see whether a new world record was set...

Obviously at some competitions you will be the organiser but announcing rounds does not take more than a few seconds. Generally if I have to announce I will also announce every person in the group if they do not have set groups beforehand

It usually takes about a 2-3 minutes.

I'd like to see older competitors step up and organise competitions. One competitor formed a club and then asked whether he can organise competitions when he attended AusNats. So it's looking promising for Sydney.

There are a handful of competitors aged 14-16 that really want competitions in their area and they go out of their way to find a suitable and affordable venue. This is great, but Dene and I end up organising those competitions.

I also do not think you should chase up competitors.

When we're running 15-30 minutes ahead of schedule I'll try to start the next round. This rarely happens, but when it does I'll ask around and make an effort to find missing competitors.

I'm happy to volunteer hundreds of hours each year to organise competitions and pay for my own travel ($10k over 4 years?). Free accommodation is greatly appreciated. Dene has been doing this for a bit longer and travels between AU and NZ to support both communities, so it'd be pretty easy to see how offensive the lazy comment was...

Perhaps it'd be easier to host FMC at the end of the first day for enthusiastic competitors and check solutions straight after...

Tim.

 

[Kirjava]

How does doing FMC at a low skill level make a mockery of FMC?

 

[cubizh]

I do think we should allow organizers to set a move limit in FMC, just as we allow them to set time limits in speedsolving events.

The fundamental difference I see between speedsolving events and events like FMC and MultiBLD in what limits are concerned is that speedsolving events *DON'T* have strict limits set in the regulations.
The regulations predict the chance of cutoffs/limits as a non-conflicting addon rule set by organizers to prevent time wasting.

For FMC (and MultiBLD) *THERE ARE* strict limits already written in the regulations that defines the event (80 moves max and 10 mins per cube up to 60 mins for mbld).
So allowing organizers to alter the number of moves that are clearly defined in the regulations already, would be to define a rule to essentially break or ignore a regulation of the event.

For all intends and purposes, it would be like having the possibility to have 5 second inspections on speed events if the organizers wanted (as strict 15 seconds is specifically defined in the regulations).
It would change the defined rules of the event.

 

[TimMc]

I would humbly suggest that you should find organisers who actually organise

We've organised 11 competitions in the past twelve months. Time isn't really a big issue. Seeing a bunch of DNF-CFOP solutions at the end of the day gave the impression that half the competitors didn't take the event seriously...

A prospective organiser in Sydney from the Unviersity of NSW approached the WCA Board and talked to us at AusNats. It'll be good to finally see someone else old enough take on a leadership role in Sydney.

Tim.

 

[Mollerz]

I understand now why you think what I said was offensive and I apologise for that, and I also apologise for being blunt, I can see why it came across as rude reading back, but I stand by the points I made still.

Reading back on everything it seems like the only reason you really want to impose this limit is because you just do not like marking CFOP solutions in FMC. Seems a bit silly doesn't it?

 

[rowan]

For all intends and purposes, it would be like having the possibility to have 5 second inspections on speed events if the organizers wanted (as strict 15 seconds is specifically defined in the regulations).
It would change the defined rules of the event.

I don't think this is a fair analogy. The 15 second inspection and 1 hour FMC time are a fundamental part of these events as laid out by the guidelines. The length of solution and time taken for solving are both results, which makes them comparable. Your point would be more analogous to allowing organizers to reduce the FMC time given from 1 hour to 45 minutes or less, which is not the request here.

 

[Jimmy Liu]

If you are trying to set FMC cutoffs just because you don't want to check long moves solutions, I suggest you not to hold FMC. I don't think the cutoffs can save that much time while checking solutions.
Again, FMC is a event that is different from speedsolving events, and the cutoffs will not be needed.

 

[rybaby]

I think this is quite possibly the most unfair thing anyone has said to me in a very long time. I would expect such comments from all these American kids that feel like it's their right, and not a privilege, to be able to go to competitions. But from you? That's disappointing...

Ok, now I believe you are just trying to make useless jabs at people without saying anything useful. "All these American kids"? How about you avoid inconsiderate generalizations that make no forward progress in this thread.

You obviously don't have a clue what I have done, and still do for this community, so you have no right to comment on this matter any more.

Quit acting so high-and-mighty. You think you're better than everyone else, don't you?

 

[kinch2002]

Quit acting so high-and-mighty. You think you're better than everyone else, don't you?

That's because he has done more than most people for the community