WCA Regulations - Out of Hand?

[uberCuber]

This is slightly off topic: Even without considering the new regulations on logos, what is preventing people from doing this tension "hack"? In fact, should we even be preventing this?

I'd love to see someone try to come up with a practical and reasonable way to prevent it. Aside from my 6x6/7x7, I never put significant effort into tensioning cubes, and so my cubes naturally tend to have uneven tensions. As it is, I can already figure out my orientation on my main 3x3 blindfolded, and not because of anything intentional.

 

[AvGalen]

I have seen delegates, WRC members and Board members put in 1000+ hours into the 2014 regulation changes, but I have yet to see a post thanking them for the work and time they have selflessly devoted to this with no intent other than to serve the community and to make our passion more fun and fair. I mostly see senseless, half-baked ideas and arguments being thrown around. So, here is my personal take on some of these issues. I hope this serves to enlighten people as to our motives and reasoning.


1. Logoes and BLD events
What great ill have we done the community here? Not because other things cannot be regulated/enforced does it mean that we should not do this for things that can easily be. And let us be honest in our arguments. Who has a cube with different tensioning on one face so that it may be used to orient it blindfolded? Or is anyone really planning on changing their tensioning for this? How hard can it be to recognize your cube if you put a little paper marker under one of the caps? Seriously, if someone is really complaining about this, get some perspective.


2. Thick tiles
This is a point where I will take most of the responsibility. My limited experience with the Latin community is what prompted me to suggest that we should make this consistent with the rest of the regulations in the sense that back colors should not be visible. The Latin community being “young”, I had seen very few people using tiled puzzles and I assumed this was similar elsewhere. I admit that I was wrong and that this change affected many more people than I expected. However, the need for consistency remains and this change has to be effected sooner or later (as much as pillowed 7x7s have to go). There are talks now of a phase-out period, so we shall wait and see what comes of them.


3. FMC mean of three
How is this decision to the detriment of fun or fairness? Should we please blindfolded solvers and skewb fans and anybody else as long as they are not Board members? Resenting official recognition to others is pathetic. Will records cease to be records if they are not officially acknowledged? Perspective again, or has anybody been terribly wronged by this?


4. Painted/printed colors
Sure, if people have nothing better to do than gripe and be a pain, they will complain about this change. People will gripe if we are too specific and people will gripe if we try to simplify. How low does the percentage of people hypothetically affected has to be for us to be allowed to introduce a simplification?


I am sure the frustration and discontent can be felt throughout this post, but please take a second to really put yourselves in our shoes. You wouldn’t be all smiles if you had put in so much work and effort into something so little appreciated either, or if you had to see people call the product of so much work "nonsense", "bulls--t" and other less than flattering adjectives. If anybody feels offended by my post, it is probably because the shoe fits, and their whining and nitpicking is as little appreciated as our efforts apparently are.


-Natán

You have seen 1000+ hours of work and I am sure that is true. I would personally like to thank everyone for their work as they are indeed not thanked for this much. From a community point of view we haven't really seen or heard anything from all this though and we feel like lots of decisions where suddenly dropped on us at the very end of the year and became active very soon after. I personally cannot imagine that the regulation changes itself required so much work. From a software-development-point-of-view I would say that a projectmanager should have been assigned and stepped in. So the entire backend was changed/cleaned up but did it actually accomplish any user-facing goal or should this work just be seen as improving the base?


1. If you want to prevent cheating you start with the big things first. This rule adds a rule but doesn't make cheating more difficult. Tensioning is one option but modding and under-the-sticker-feeling is just as easy. This rule seems like DRM: You try to prevent cheating but cheating will still be possible in another way while at the same time you are putting a burden on all the honest people.
2. Thank you for explaining why you suggested this and for not pushing it through. I don't see this pressing need for consistency but I am going to submit an alternative proposal tonight as I wrote previously.
3. I have addressed this in great detail in another thread and in posts to the board. The summary is that I think this event is now more inconsistent than before and that to many changes were made at the same time that created an event that isn't the event most people want it to be.
4. Most people don't understand why this rule is needed at all and I actually haven't seen an explanation for it yet. I read this entire thread but didn't find it. Again this rule seems to have no benefit for the competitor and means people cannot use their current cube anymore.


I understand that sometimes rules need to be made to keep things fair and consistent but if the rule doesn't achieve it's goal and has side-effects that influence competitors directly it probably should be stopped. These rules are made with good intentions but if the results are mostly negative it will be seen as bloat/bureaucracy and that point seems to have been reached.


I am not taking an armchair position on this. I will get actively involved and hope that I will be able to make some changes that will benefit competitors while still promoting fair sportsmanship

 

[Dene]

I have seen delegates, WRC members and Board members put in 1000+ hours into the 2014 regulation changes, but I have yet to see a post thanking them for the work and time they have selflessly devoted to this with no intent other than to serve the community and to make our passion more fun and fair. I mostly see senseless, half-baked ideas and arguments being thrown around. So, here is my personal take on some of these issues. I hope this serves to enlighten people as to our motives and reasoning.

Hi Natan,

I just wanted to respond to this based on my own experience.

One has to be careful when resenting the negative feedback of the community. The vast majority of people (myself previously included) have no idea of the functioning of the WCA in terms of regulations, the board and the WRC. One cannot expect people on an open forum such as this to come up with objections/arguments against regulation changes that are thorough and take all aspects into consideration, when they have no idea what goes into things in the first place.

In fact, this is the perfect place for "half-baked ideas and arguments" to be discussed and fleshed out until they become something tangible with the guidance of more informed members of the community. It might not be pretty or nice to read through, but this is the best platform for discussions about changes, past and future, to be had. With any luck, these can turn into productive discussions that lead to real, positive change.

I would recommend you don't read too much into what people say, as they are naive to the hard-work realities of what goes into this organisation. Instead, focus on what productive things can come out of what you see on here.

 

[XTowncuber]

4. Painted/printed colors
Sure, if people have nothing better to do than gripe and be a pain, they will complain about this change. People will gripe if we are too specific and people will gripe if we try to simplify. How low does the percentage of people hypothetically affected has to be for us to be allowed to introduce a simplification?

Will someone please tell me why this change was made? Anybody?

 

[cubizh]

Will someone please tell me why this change was made? Anybody?

The regulations commit of the logo changes is detailed here.
For the discussion that triggered it, see issues #13 and #33 for further details.

 

[AvGalen]

I'd love to see someone try to come up with a practical and reasonable way to prevent it. Aside from my 6x6/7x7, I never put significant effort into tensioning cubes, and so my cubes naturally tend to have uneven tensions. As it is, I can already figure out my orientation on my main 3x3 blindfolded, and not because of anything intentional.

This is exactly the reason that I wrote my (future) proposal the way I did. Almost every cube contains some anomalies that make cheating possible. Having such anomalies shouldn't be prevented. It is the abuse of such anomalies that should be prevented (which is impossible) and punished

 

[XTowncuber]

The regulations commit of the logo changes is detailed here.
For the discussion that triggered it, see issues #13 and #33 for further details.

I still can't see the place where they discussed that change. Painted colors are not the same as colored plastic.

 

[AvGalen]

The regulations commit of the logo changes is detailed here.
For the discussion that triggered it, see issues #13 and #33 for further details.

I read the commit changes where it just seems that all references to paint disappeared. I also read #13 and #33 and didn't read any explanation. Having this access to the regulations is great and is a real eye-opener. But I am either missing the point of these links or there simply was no reason for removing paint

 

[cubizh]

I still can't see the place where they discussed that change. Painted colors are not the same as colored plastic.

I read the commit changes where it just seems that all references to paint disappeared. I also read #13 and #33 and didn't read any explanation. Having this access to the regulations is great and is a real eye-opener. But I am either missing the point of these links or there simply was no reason for removing paint

Unfortunately that was all I could find regarding the subject.
More discussion on logos was held in this thread, but not specifically regarding painted stickers.
Perhaps I am missing something which is a strong possibility, of course.
But for the moment, your guess is as good as mine.