BuzzerBeater Forums

The problem isn't Lithuania division III after the cleanup. The problem is the active teams that were relegated into D.IV leagues where they were the only active team with 15 bots.

Imagine that you were a replacement team in D.III, you start out in 8th place with a 4-14 record, and as you try to figure out the game, you manage to win two games and finish 6-16. You then get relegated in IV.46 and will face a season of games against bots. You are going to get bored. You might only log in once a week, and then skip a week, and you might quit. Or maybe you stick through a wasted season, and get promoted back to D.III. But since you weren't challenged, your team might not be that good.

I'm simply saying that it is better to relegate teams into leagues where they have to compete against other active owners.

The current pro/rel system is a compromise. You need to use a 1:4 pyramid, or you could end up with a huge number of divisons. If you used a 1:2 pyramid, you would right now be adding teams into a Spanish 9th division.

But you don't want to make it too risky to relegate. For example, if you had two teams promoting from each league, you would have to have 8 teams relegating from each league, which could mean that some 5th place teams with a 14-8 record might be relegated. So having 1 in 16 chance of promoting is on the low side, but may be necessary if you don't want to have too many teams relegating.

When you add a new division, you quadruple the capacity of a country. So you can easily go from 100% filled to 25% filled. You want to have lots of room for new owners - because you never want to make someone wait until the start of the season to begin playing.

So most of the time you will have lots and lots of space, just in case. But most of the time these bots should just be used as a reserve, or perhaps to fill out the field for the early rounds of the cup.

The USA has enough owners for around 47 leagues, or 3 divisions plus 26 of 64 D.IV leagues. So instead of a 1:4:16:64 pyramid, you could have a 1:4:16:26 pyramid. You should take advantage of this, and provide additional opportunities for promotion from D.IV. Because of the dynamic nature of new owners, you can't base pro/rel on a fixed 26 league in D.IV, but you can base it on providing 64 promoting teams to match the number of teams being relegated from D.III. You of course would include league champions that are active, and then additional active teams based on their regular season record (just as you now use for the secondary bot cleanup).

Because you are limiting promotion to active teams, any relegated teams will go into leagues with active teams (as long as you maintain a footprint of leagues with active teams).

Last edited by jimrtex at 4/5/2008 5:31:37 AM