BuzzerBeater Forums

Goals:

(1) To give all teams meaningful playoff games, without devaluing regular season play.
(2) To relegate all bots to the lowest divisions in country.
(3) Keep leagues as full of active owners as possible.

Rules:

(1) Bots never promote, and if possible, will relegate to lowest division.
(2) Top N teams promote from a division, where N is the number of leagues in the division. If a division is fully activated, the N teams are the league champions. If fewer leagues are activated, 2nd place teams, etc. can promote.
(3) Additional teams can promote if they will replace bots.
(4) Bottom 4 teams in a league relegate, unless there are not enough promotable teams to replace them, or there are bots that can save them (eg 3 active teams might relegate from one league if there are 5 bots in another).

Ranking:

Teams within each league will be ranked 1 to 16, except all bots will be ranked lower. Following the last regular season game, all bots will be treated as if they they had finished at the bottom of the conference standings before the playoff pairings were set.

Classification (9-16):

The bottom 4 teams in each conference will play the bottom 4 teams in the opposite conference. The site of each game will be the opposite of where the teams played during the regular season (because a team might play 4 home or 4 road games, revenues should be split). The teams will carry forward their record from the 10 regular season games against the other 7 teams, so that classification will be based on the 14 games between the teams ranked 9-16. The regular season record might be used as tie-breaker. Games will be played Tue-Sat-Tue-Sat.

Classificiation (3-8):

The 3 teams that lose in the conference playoffs will face the 3 teams in the opposite conference. The site of each game will be the opposite of where the teams played during the regular season (because a team might play 4 home or 4 road games, revenues should be split). The teams will carry forward their record from the 7 regular season games against the other 5 teams, so that classification will be based on the 10 games between the teams ranked 3-8. The regular season record might be used as tie-breaker. Games will be played Sat-Tue-Thu-Sat:

Sat: B3-G4 and G3-B4 (losers in conference semifinals on Tue).
Tue: B3-G3, B2-G4, G2-B4 (B2 and G2 are losers in conference finals on Sat)
Thu: B2-G2
Sat: B4-G4, B2-G3, B4-G4.

If a Thursday date conflicts with the cup or scrimmages, it can be moved to Sunday.

Playoffs (1-2):

The top 4 teams in each conference enter the playoffs, which will be contested using the current format. Teams that lose in the 1st two rounds will switch to the (3-8) classification. The team that wins the playoffs will be ranked #1, the other conference champion will be ranked #2.

Tue: B1-B4, B2-B3, G1-G4, and G2-G3 (losers to classification 3-8)
Sat: Winners play for conference championship, (losers to classification 3-8).
Tue, Sat, Sun (if needed), Best of 3 for league championship.

Ranking (1-16):

After completion of playoffs, all bots should be slid to bottom of the league rankings.

Promotion/Relegation in next message.

did you not like how we handled it last season? which I think was slightly different in the details than your proposal, but effectively resulted in the human teams all getting slid up and bots slid down and the human teams were promoted based upon their regular season records.

There's another message coming about promotion and relegation. One thing that this does, is it will make the whole process more visible, and not just teams surprised that they ended up in a new division.

What I've presented so far is mainly about a system of playoffs that gives every
team 4 or 5 post-season games that are meaningful and will produce an overall ranking of teams. In deciding which teams might be relegated it combines the regular season and the post-season.

The pro/rel scheme will handle the case of the bottom division (that has active teams in it, eg IV in the USA). This division will rarely be full - you have to choose between having a pyramid at capacity, or adding a division and being at 25% filled. Even if you double the number of active teams during the next , the bottom divisiion will only be 1/3 filled. So instead of a 1:4:16:64 pyramid, you practically will have a 1:4:16:21 pyramid. So instead of 1 up and 4 down pro/rel scheme, you could have a 3 up and 4 down scheme (the 1 up and 4 down scheme is a compromise between not wanting to relegate too many teams, and being able to fit a few 1000 teams within sight of the 1st division). Since roughly 94% of teams are in the bottom two divisions you will be giving a lot more new teams a chance of early success.

If you look at the league standings for my league (IV.18) you'll see that I had a relegation playoff with a team that had 4 fewer wins, and there were 6 teams that finished with 8 or 9 wins. It may be better in some cases to relegate 4 teams from one conference.

Promotion/Relegation

Teams will have been ranked 1 to 16 within their league, with bots pushed to the bottom - so even if a bot wins their league playoffs they won't be #1 unless their league is completely bot. There should also be an inter-league ranking, so for example, that among teams that finished #2 in their respective leagues, there will be a priority for promotion.

Teams within each division can then be classified in 5 lists:

(1) Definite promotion. This is the top N active teams in a division, where N is the number of leagues. If all leagues in a division have active teams, this is simply all the 1st place teams from the division. Otherwise, it can include 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. teams. A team must be in the top 8 within its league to promote.automatically, so sometimes the list will have less than N teams, and can even be empty.

(2) Conditional promotion to replace bots. This includes the remaining active teams in 2nd through 8th places. They can be promoted if there are more than N bots in the division above.

(3) Retained. Active teams that finish 9th through 12th. Teams from (2) that don't promote, active teams that relegate from the division above, teams from (4) that don't relegate, and active teams from the division below that promote will be added later.

(4) Conditional relegation. Active teams that finish 13th through 16th. These teams can only be replaced by definite promotion teams (1) from the division below. They may be retained if there are lots of bots, or few activated leagues in the division below.

(5) Bots, regardless of their place. These will be relegated except when there is an extreme number of bots.

Promotion/relegation should be done a pair of divisions at a time. This ensure that active teams can only be promoted one division, while bots can be relegated multiple divisions.

There are two cases:

Case I. More (or same number of) bots (5) in the upper division than definite promotion candidates (1) in the lower division. In this case, extra promotiion teams are moved from the conditional promotion list (2) to the definite promotion list (1). In some extreme instances, this will exhaust the conditional promotion list. This will simply result in some bots being retained in the upper division. When this occurs, the bots that are relegated should be selected so as to balance the number of teams between leagues (more active teams promote into the leagues with more bots).

All conditional relegation teams (4) in the upper division will be retained, as will any remaining conditional promotion teams (2) in the lower division. Teams that promote will be moved to the retained list (3) for the division above, and relegated bots will be moved to the bot list for the division below so that they can be relegated further.

Note that Case I covers the trivial case where a division is totally bot. There are no promotable teams, which will be the same or fewer than the number of bots in the upper division.

Case II. Fewer bots (5) in the upper division than definite promotion (1) teams in the lower division. All bots and some (or all) conditional relegation (4) teams in the upper division will be relegated. Some of the conditional relegation (4) teams in the upper division may be protected from relegation. This will occur if some of the leagues in the upper division have 5 or more bots, or if there are relatively few activated leagues in the lower division.

If any conditional relegation (4) teams are saved from relegation, they are moved to the retained list (3). Then the bots (5) and the remaining conditional relegation (4)teams swap with the definite promotion (1) teams. Active teams are moved to the retained list in their new division, along with the conditional promotion (2) teams in the lower division since they remained in the division. The bots are moved to bot list in the lower division for possible further relegation.

Some final notes:

The playoffs should still occur for the top 1/2 of the 1st division, and the bottom 1/2 of the bottom division. Even though these teams can't promote or relegate, there can be financial incentives, either through prize money or more revenue from fans. In the case of the bottom division the games might also serve to determine qualification for the next season's cup.

The scheme avoids teams bouncing, either bots promoting and relegating, or active teams relegating then promoting. It also avoids relegating active teams into leagues filled with bots. Since only active teams can promote, a relegated team will end up in a league with other active teams.

Replacement of bots with new owners should be oriented toward maintaining as many leagues in the lower divisions with roughly the same number of teams. For example, let's say that roughly 30 leagues can be filled in D.IV. This means that 2 and sometimes 3 teams will be promoted to D.III. If there are lots of bots in D.III then more teams will be promoted from each league. It is better that the 30 leagues have about the same number of active teams so that each have about the same opportunity to promote.