Hello Ina,
I’m Oskar from the GermanOpen Orga Team. I know that this answer comes a little late, however I am afraid that this might be relevant for some competitions in the future, too.
Thank you again in the name of our teams, we are really very disappointed with the decision of the German Committee and can not understand this.
That’s an important question, so let me explain our decision.
The reason why we use the “old” rules is that the final versions of the rules have often been published in December or even later. Therefore, the first round competitions (“Vorturniere”), which start in late January or early February, do not have enough time to build/order new material that might be required and the teams do not have enough time to prepare.
Also, as far as I know, we need to commit to a ruleset much ealier than that when announcing a Robocup event to the Federation - at a point in time where the “new” rules do not even exist.
We know that this situation is not optimal because the rules change between the German Open and the world championship. However, this only affects the best teams (the ones which qualify for the world championship) which we trust to be able to handle this challenge. The alternative would be to have a very short preparation time for all teams (around one month) after the rules are fixed, therefore leading to overall lower performance in the competition.
Additionally, it would make the organization of the first round competitions - which often have very limited resources anyway - much harder or impossible. As we are interested to provide these competitions as close to the teams’ home locations as possible, we don’t want to put additional challenges like these hard time constraints on them which might lead to some competitions not being held anymore.
We have already discussed this issue with the TC and they promised to release the rules earlier (e.g. in September), which is the only way we think this situation can be solved for everyone. The final Line and Maze 2020 rules, however, have been released in December 2019, again. So from our point of view, there is still room for improvement regarding the rule release schedule.
The reason that some other countries do not have this problem, is the success of the Robocup in Germany: we have so many teams (Roberta RegioZentrum Hannover alone has more Maze teams than some countries have), that we cannot run one single competition but need local competitions, which requires us to start about two months earlier than other countries.
I hope that this explains why we use the older rulesets even if this might not be optimal for you (as far as I remember, some of your teams have been qualified for the world championship, therefore facing the issue of changing rules between competitions).
Greetings from Magdeburg,
Oskar