Relegation playoff with 3 child comps won't promote/relegate

[AQ]

Hi. I’m having a problem with a relegation/promotion playoff involving 4 teams: 

• 1 team from the third division (17th place in a 20-team division, 3 lowest automatically relegate)
• 3 second place teams from three child competitions in the 4th division. (The league winners automatically promote to the 3rd division.) 

The rules are verified, the teams play the playoff, but tests show the teams never actually promote or relegate. 

I have replicated the settings from the Bundesliga relegation playoff and customized them for this league. I’ve also checked it against this post. And I've tinkered a lot. I can't get the promotion/relegation to work. 

Can anyone help with a suggested fix? 

Here are Fate Actions for the playoff. (It's Stage 2, because an English-style promotion playoff occurs at the top of the table for Stage 1.) 

Here are Qualification Rules for the relegating division: 

Here are Qualifications Rules for the three child competitions: 

Here is the league file: 

a - 5.84 - Fix promotion & relegation in playoff.fmf

For background, if you’re interested, it’s a British and Irish pyramid, with 20-team divisions, including: 

• Premier League with Celtic and Rangers added;
• Second tier with Aberdeen and Hibernian added;
• Third tier with the next six SPL teams; 
• Fourth tier with three child comps: Northern Regional, Southern Regional (including Welsh teams), and Celtic Regional with Scottish and Irish teams
• Fifth tier with six child comps: Three English promotion leagues, and regional divisions including a Scottish promotion league, Welsh Promotion League, and Irish league (including northern Irish). All first tier Irish, N. Irish, and Welsh clubs are included, along with a few second tier teams. 
• Scottish, Welsh, Irish, and English cups send teams to European competitions. 
• An FA cup for English, Scottish, Irish, Northern Irish and Welsh teams.
• Brexit gone (because I'm already putting in tighter foreign player rules), parachute payments gone (but I might put them back in), and a few other things out.
• I moved a Cornish team (Truro) and my nearest local British team up to the fifth tier, just because I want to. 
• ("Unified" doesn't imply unifying Ireland with the UK. It's just a unified league. No politics here. )

If you can please help, I’d really appreciate it. This is my last thing to hit for the competition (unless I keep tinkering, which I don't want to! ). Thanks so much. 

Edited August 3, 2021 by AQ
clarity

[krlenjushka]

Thick "find stage in child comps" and try again.

[AQ]

Thanks! I tried that in Fate Actions.

Unfortunately, it still doesn't work.

I've attached the revised file: 

a - 5.84 - Fix promotion & relegation in playoff.fmf

Do you have any other suggestions? 

(I'm going through everything, and I'm reading posts throughout the forum. I just can't get it right.) 

[AQ]

Also, here are the images of a competition test.  

First the playoff final: 

And then the next season's league, which shows the team that should have been relegated to the 4th division was still in the 3rd division: 

Again, thank you for any help you can provide. Any ideas are greatly appreciated. 

 

[krlenjushka]

Your rounds have wrong stage name.  Fate actions are set to semi final and final.

 

[AQ]

Wow, I can't believe I missed that. Thank you! 

Now that I've changed it, a strange thing has happened in the tests.

Every single test comes out with the higher division team winning the relegation playoff final. I ran 10 separate tests for 10-20 years each. The higher division team won EVERY one. 

As a result, I can't see whether the promotion or relegation is working. 

(Prior to changing this, the higher division team won about two-thirds of playoff cups, which seems about right. If I switch the round name back to "replay" and "replay", then the results normalize again, but obviously the promotion and relegation don't work.)

Any ideas on what's happening and how to fix it?

Here's the current file. 

a - 5.84 - Fix promotion & relegation in playoff.fmf

Thanks again!

Edited August 3, 2021 by AQ

[AQ]

So yeah, relegation playoffs look scripted to always go to the higher division team. 

Out of curiosity, I ran tests for the German and French leagues to see what happens with their relegation playoffs, as they use them in their top three divisions. I used the base 21.4.0 database, added Nation Rules for Germany, converted to Advanced Rules to see the test results, made no changes to the database, and ran a 10-year test. 

Every playoff went to the higher division team. That's 10 years for:

• Bundesliga v. Bundesliga 2
• Bundesliga 2 v. 3. Liga
• Ligue 1 v. Ligue 2
• Ligue 2 v. French 3rd division

40 playoffs.

Every one went to the higher division club. 

I could run more for a larger sample size, but I've already spent too many hours on this, having run about 200 years worth of competition tests in my own edited database. So I'm done.  

I could be wrong. Hopefully I am. I'm certainly no coding expert. And obviously there are no guarantees on whether it actually works out like this in-game, but I think that's kind of the point of the competition tests.

Feel free to try it. See what you get. 

Edited August 4, 2021 by AQ

[nasaiain]

When running the test in the editor it is very basic, it just makes sure the competitions are working correctly.

When I run a seeded cup in the editor almost without fail the highest team will always win, when you run it in game this is not the case as the games are better simulated and there is always a chance of the lower seeded team winning.

Always run a test in game once you are happy the editor is working, as it can either confirm everything is ok

Edited August 4, 2021 by nasaiain

[AQ]

Thanks for the insights, Nasaiain. Good to know. Maybe the game will work out differently from the tests. 

Based on that, I've decided to load it into my save. Hopefully, the worst thing that happens is that it behaves like it looks, and nobody actually promotes. It's occurred to me that result wouldn't be any different from if I cut the playoff out of the game. 

[AQ]

Hi, just wanted to let you know that it worked. Thank you both again for the suggested fixes and the insights, re: tests. Much appreciated.