Questions about general gameplay

Rules and Roadmap
#1

Some questions:

  1. Lines 415 and 1384 indicate that robots that are manually started have to wait 15s before locomoting at every stoppage of play. Does that mean at every kick-off, drop ball AND free kick? What happens if a robot taking a free kick is manually started?
  • Line 284 states that “all substitutes are subject to the authority and jurisdiction of the referee, whether called upon to play or not”. Can a referee use this rule to block an otherwise legal substitution? For what situations is this rule relevant?
  • Line 605 states that “The allowance for time lost is at the discretion of the referee.” Does this mean that the referee can choose to add 1 minute to a game half for example? Or should this perhaps be reworded that the allowance for time lost is automatically performed by the game controller, in the form of the time compensations that it already automatically does?
  • Line 252 says that a match may not start if either team has less than one player. Does this mean that the team without a robot forfeits the match, or is it somehow postponed?
  • Multiple methods of resolving drawn games have been presented (extra time, kicks from the penalty mark, extended kicks from the penalty mark). Which of these will actually be used at RoboCup to decide drawn games? This is not stated. If it is extra time followed by extended kicks, does that mean that penalty shootouts are never carried out against a goalie anymore?
#2
  1. I don’t know. Reinhard?
  2. There must be a clear reason for preventing a substitution.
  3. The game controller currently does not allow to compensate for general interruptions of the game. I think it is important to give the referee the allowance to compensate for time lost independent of the game controller as well.
  4. Good point, it seems the “forfeit” rule is missing as well. Anyway, I think the last years it was decided that teams have to play against an empty goal if one team has not robot that is capable of playing. So this rule should be changed. It should say that the team needs to clearly indicate that they are not forfeiting (according to the missing rule that will be added again) and then the game starts without that team.
  5. As stated in line 1771, the order is: (away) goals, extra time, kicks from the penalty mark and extended kicks from the penalty mark. The regular penalty shoot-outs are supposed to occur between the extra time and the extended kicks from the penalty mark. However, if both teams agree, they can start with extended kicks from the penalty mark right away. However, another point that just came to my mind is that currently over time is not optional, while in the last rule book the ball needed to be moved across one of the goal lines at least once in order to apply over time. I think this rule should be added to the new rule book as well, otherwise we might get a lot of pointless over time.
#3

  1. Yes, manual start comes with a 15 seconds penalty after a storage of the game. At kick-off the kick-off team has 10 seconds to kick the ball. After that the ball is in play (line 1401). (If the other team’s robot has a walking speed of more than 50cm/5seconds, they could kind of ‘steal’ the kick-off.)

  2. Substitutes must not interfere with the game play. In order to possibly enforce this, the rule is required. Referees may use yellow and red cards on substitutes and thus could exclude them from the game.

  3. This is an official FIFA rule. The referee may decide to add time to any period of the game. (We used to have a rule on some extra time in our old rules.) I would not favor rewording - unless through FIFA.

  4. The consequences typically are defined in the competition rules (our section 2). What I know from some lower-level real soccer leagues, there is some extra time (10 … 30 minutes) for the team to field the minimum number of players. A team that has less players forfeits and loses by a defined goal difference (should be 0:10 in our case). Maike mentioned our previous approach. We should therefore add an extra paragraph in our section 2.

  5. Everything said, except - we could just improve the robots :wink:
    (… and we should man´ke sure the specific rules are in the competition rules and not in the FIFA part if possible.)

#4
  1. So just to confirm, free kicks are stoppages of the game where manually started robots have to wait 15s before moving?
  • So essentially substitutions can only be blocked if the substitute robot has been awarded a red card or so. We presume this would be a very rare event?
  • Maike: Ok, the referee can further extend the game beyond that what the game controller says, to compensate for interruptions of the game that the game controller can’t know about. But, we think that the referee should not be able to cut a game short if there’s still time on the clock of the game controller (unless there was an obvious mistake in operating the game controller of course etc). Is this supported?
  • The forfeit rule and playing on an empty goal we think is reasonable. Losing by a defined goal difference is inappropriate, especially 0:10, because in that case the ‘winning’ team would suddenly get 10 points in the round robin for free, which would be quite unfair to other teams. If the team can score 10 goals in 20 minutes on the other hand, then they deserve the 10 points that they would earn with the “play on empty goal” approach.
  • Maike: Agreed (including the optional overtime etc). We also think this is how it should be (although away goals in the current competition setup will of course never be applicable). We presume you meant line 1171, which in our eyes however only says “these four methods exist and can be used”. It does not imply that the four methods will be used in that order. A quick modification to that line could make that clear though. Just as a technicality, we would like to point out though that kicks from the penalty mark is ‘final’ as “kicks continue to be taken in the same order until one team has scored a goal more than the other from the same number of kicks”. We presume the RoboCup intention is for play to continue with extended kicks if after five kicks there is a draw.
#5

2 Yes, it should be a very rare event.
3. This is supported and I can’t see how one could read the rules in a way that this is allowed anyway. Line 605 and onward state that “Allowance is made in either period for all time lost…” and I don’t think this can interpreted that the referee can cut time. However, we want to investigate the way time loss is compensated in the GameController and document it more clearly for the referees to raise awareness for the time loss they don’t need extra compensation for.
5. Ah, that is right, at least the wording of the “kicks from the penalty mark” section will be changed. Since Reinhard wants to touch the FIFA rules as little as possible, I will add a clarifying sentence in Section II saying that this order is fixed unless the ball has not been moved enough so overtime does not apply and that teams can agree to skip regular penalty shoots.