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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">Dear SSL community,</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">First of all, thank you very much for your valuable and constructive feedback so far. And also thanks to the teams
to raise their concerns.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">Here is some feedback to the questions from recent mails:</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 700">Introducing walls in 2020</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">Walls will still be optional. The incentive of how the optionallity has been defined is: If the majority of the teams
prefer to play with walls, more games will actually be played with walls. If a few teams prefer it, there will be less games with walls. We could change the rule such that both teams have to agree to play with walls, if that is the preferred option for the
majority of teams.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">We also considered other options to test the idea of walls, but they all have their issues:</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">A mandatory technical challenge would require several games to be played, besides the official tournament. This is
hard to fit into the schedule and means more games for the teams. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">Based on the experience of recent years, teams do not, or cannot, spend as much time working on technical challenges
as on the main game. In the case of demos and TCs, teams may not fully adapt to the gameplay with walls and we would not be able to see the full potential of gameplay with walls.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">That led us to the idea to integrate it into the group stage. And if teams already started trying out things, they
might want to play more than one game with walls.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">We are still open for better suggestions to test such ideas effectively.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">As of now we do have some example gameplay between some of the Japanese teams on a field with the walls configuration:
</span><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/c7t3b6du7fvu5ry/AADwUJ8tqclBXMIaXpJWP5ixa?dl=0"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(17, 85, 204); font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; text-decoration-skip: none">https://www.dropbox.com/sh/c7t3b6du7fvu5ry/AADwUJ8tqclBXMIaXpJWP5ixa?dl=0</span></a></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">The committees made several observations from the practice game, both encouraging and indicating further work, but
we would like to provide the videos to the community without these observations to allow everyone to make their own observations without bias</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 700">Long-Term Objectives of the SSL</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">We have understood that teams wish a better view on the long term roadmap of the SSL. We talked a lot about the future
of the SSL recently, and this is under active discussion among the ECs, trustees, and the President. This will be a topic of major discussion during both the open and closed committee meetings at RoboCup 2020.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 700">11 robots and field size</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">The issue with the defense is a good point that should be further investigated. One way to mitigate this issue would
be to increase the defense area and goal width only. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">The current field size is not intended to be “final” for multiple years. We fully intend to re-evaluate each year
as we progress, based on game metrics including pass success rates, shot precision, and robot navigation speeds. </span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 700">Inconsistent handling of fouls</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">That’s at least partially a misunderstanding (see the comments in the spreadsheet). For fouls, the foul counter is
incremented already, so this was not explicitly added in the spreadsheet.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 700">What’s next?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">We asked to submit feedback till the end of November so that we can prepare an agenda for the announced online meeting
with the team leaders. We plan to hold two meetings to make it more likely that everyone can attend.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">We will do our best to reply to all the feedback that is coming in. Some of the answers are not as easy to answer
as others, so we focus on those, which can easily be answered and collect the remaining ones.</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">Some concerns are much easier to be discussed verbally. That’s why we proposed the online meeting.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">We will create an agenda based on the concerns and feedback we got and publish it here:
</span><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IUZ7o8Z7wXe-BFXQOsCmQ3Z-ielWMzkHt0PYEMT0giw/edit?usp=sharing"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(17, 85, 204); font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; text-decoration-skip: none">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IUZ7o8Z7wXe-BFXQOsCmQ3Z-ielWMzkHt0PYEMT0giw/edit?usp=sharing</span></a></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 700">Which of the proposals will be implemented?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">Most of the feedback so far was rather negative. We would like to setup a form where teams can submit their votes
to get a better idea of what is the general consensus among all teams and to get individual feedback to each proposed rule change.</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 700">Reminder</span></p>
<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">Please fill out this form (or send us the Name, Team and Mail of your leader):
</span><a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScXR8BGCPYzZVHh0YUw8S75rYmV5HmCZk6xdenIvRXbV5yhbQ/viewform?usp=sf_link"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(17, 85, 204); font-weight: 400; text-decoration: underline; text-decoration-skip: none">https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScXR8BGCPYzZVHh0YUw8S75rYmV5HmCZk6xdenIvRXbV5yhbQ/viewform?usp=sf_link</span></a></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">Thank you!</span></p>
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<p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; font-weight: 400">The Technical, Organization, and Executive Committees of the Small Size League</span></p>
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