BuzzerBeater Forums

The primary cause of this is that bots are being promoted from bot-filled leagues in D.IV. As D.III has become more contested, more non-bot teams are being relegated, with some of these going into the bot-filled leagues at the high end of D.IV. These relegated teams will either get bored and quit, in which case, their league will have another bot promote; or they will get bored but still win their league playoff and promote back to D.III, but possibly having an active team relegated into their place to battle 15 bots.

Meanwhile the bots that are promoted into D.III are instantly relegated back into D.IV, but a different league. Since these leagues are are usually low-number, these bots are replaced sooner, leaving more of the high-numbered leagues with one team.

One solution is to integrate the bot cleanup with the regular pro/relegation. The key principle is that promotion and relegation should be determined on a relative rather than a absolute basis. That is, a team should not be promoted unless it is more deserving of the place in the higher division than the team that is being relegated. In particular, a team with a 0-22 owner who logs in every few weeks is more deserving than any bot, even one that is 22-0 and sweeps its playoffs.

The basic rules:

1) Any active team may promote to replace a bot;
2) No bot may promote.
3) An active playoff winner may swap places with an active 8th place team, or a 6th or 7th place team that loses its relegation playoff.
4) An active first place team that does not win its playoffs may swap places with an active 8th place team, or a 6th or 7th place team that loses its relegation playoff.
5) An active 2nd place team that does not win its playoffs may swap places with an active 8th place team, or a 7th place team that loses its relegation playoff.
6) An active 3rd place team that does not win its playoffs may swap places with an active 8th place team.

Rules 4, 5, and 6 only come into play when there are relatively few leagues in the lower division, and open up some promotion opportunities that are currently taken by bots.

Implementing Pro/Rel. This is done on a pair of divisions at a time, begining with the top 2:

Rank the active teams based on (0) Division that team finished in; (1) Playoff winner or not; (2) League Finish; (3) League Wins; (4) League point differential; (5) League points scored; (6) some ultimate tie-breaker. Rank all bots below all active teams. The ranking is fairly arbitrary, but perhaps could use place, so that the top promoting teams tend to get distributed across all leagues.

Then go through the two rankings, beginning with the lowest ranked team in the upper division, and highest ranked team in the lower division. Determining whether the two teams can be swapped using the rules above. If they can not, pro/rel between the two divisions is complete. Otherwise, swap the two teams and continue with the next ranked pair of teams (or if all teams in the upper division have been relegated.

Usually, the lowest ranked teams in the upper division will be bots, so the first swaps will swap bots with active playoff winners. If there are lot of bots in the upper division, the swapping may continue with bots being swapped with active teams with good regular season performances. Once all the bots are relegated, then we check to see if their are any active teams that finished 8th or lost their relegation playoff that may swap places with an active team in the lower division.

After completing the first two divisions, proceed to the next pair of divisions II and III. The teams in D.II should be re-ranked. This will move any active teams that relegated from D.I to D.II to the end of the relegation list so they won't be dropped further, and any bots toward the front of the relegation list so that they can rlegate further divisions.

Last edited by jimrtex at 5/19/2008 6:49:50 PM

edit: i write nonsense ;)

Last edited by CrazyEye at 5/19/2008 7:05:12 PM

If the above suggestion were implemented, there would never be active teams relegated into bot-filled leagues. But it may be useful to have a consolidation after the first time it is used since there may be some residual isolated teams. Since bots relegate first, and most isolated active teams win their playoffs, there will be much fewer such teams than in the past, and they will slowly disappear through attrition. But it could be better to speed up the process.

The above pro/rel algorithm automatically handles the case of an all bot-filled division, such as D.V in the USA. Since the most promotable team in D.V is a bot, when pro/rel is done betweem D.IV and D.V, no swapping will occur because bots can never be promoted.

When new owners are added, they should be assigned to teams with losing records. This will reduce the number of teams that take over teams with good records and are prematurely promoted. If they start early in the season, they will still have a reasonable chance to make the playoffs. If they begin late in the season, they will be able to familiarize themselves with the game and start the next season with a 0-0 record. This will also tend to give them better draft picks.

yeah your system could work, but i like it more if you made active leagues at the end of the season, which could be easily done with a knapsack algorythm(i think a greedy algorithm don't kill the server even if they ahd to work a bit longer).

In this case their a many bot who promote and their we could combine it your idea and let people of the higher leagues get downswing when people in lower leagues exist, who could promote.

If my system had always been used, there would not be any isolated teams, except in unusual circumstances, such as when a lot of new owners join in a burst, and then there is a slow decline in teams for a country. In cases like this, after 5 or 6 weeks, many of the new signups will have stopped logging in, and you will have leagues with just a few active teams.

But that might be better addressed by adding new owners into leagues with the fewest active teams. So if a league was down to 4 active teams, 12 new owners could be added at once, where they should be more or less competitive with the other new owners. This would be better than adding a 16th team into 12 leagues, where the new team may end up losing regularly to veteran teams.

If my system had always been used, there would not be any isolated teams, except in unusual circumstances, such as when a lot of new owners join in a burst, and then there is a slow decline in teams for a country. In cases like this, after 5 or 6 weeks, many of the new signups will have stopped logging in, and you will have leagues with just a few active teams.

But that happen in BB several times, one time with the travia action, then with the banner at hattrick and again with the news that they are in the exchange programm with ht.

If my system had always been used, there would not be any isolated teams, except in unusual circumstances, such as when a lot of new owners join in a burst, and then there is a slow decline in teams for a country. In cases like this, after 5 or 6 weeks, many of the new signups will have stopped logging in, and you will have leagues with just a few active teams.

But that happen in BB several times, one time with the travia action, then with the banner at hattrick and again with the news that they are in the exchange programm with ht.

This can be better be handled by how new teams are added. When there is a burst of new owners, you can simply fill as many leagues are needed. Then in the slow periods you can be more selective. Even in the slow periods, BB is adding lots of owners - but are losing a lot more. They might add 50 new owners, while losing 100 owners. Right now they try to maintain IV.1 with 16 owners. In fact, if IV.1 loses an owner during the bot'ification on Monday morning, the team will often have a new owner that same day. Meanwhile IV.40 may be losing owners for weeks, before BB gets around to replacing them, perhaps during the next signup burst.

But instead, you could add teams to the leagues that have the most openings. You might have periods where leagues have around 12 active teams, some with more, some with less. But that is better than having the same number of teams, but with some in leagues with 16 active teams, and others in leagues with 2 or 3 teams.

I have to make a proposal to solve the problem:

1. Each team going to have a team of reserves to fill up the seats in the lower leagues.
2. They could not climb division because were excluded from the play off.
3. The worst team of reserves was replaced by each new team set up at every stage.
4. The reserve team which had been forced to surrender the sports society could choose to sell their players to new owners.
5. The players were sold for an average price fixed for each division and was known by all
6. the new bot were filled by teams that have not yet had reservations

Last edited by alfFC at 5/29/2008 7:18:03 PM