Playoff and Scheduling Issues

[adineen98]

I've created an editor data file that resembles the real-life structure in Ireland as closely as I can. The file verifies in basic rules, however, there is a issue with the playoffs; in real life, as of the 2018 season, teams that finish 2nd to 4th in the First Division enter a promotion playoff. The teams which finish 3rd and 4th play each other over a two-legged tie, with the winner advancing to play the team which finished second in another two-legged tie. The winner of that tie then advances to a promotion/relegation playoff with the team that finished 9th in the Premier Division. This doesn't happen in game, though, I've the rules set up in basic rules as follows: 

 

The game does't do this; instead, it sees the playoffs as two different things, with the promotion playoff in the First Division having no effect on promotion, while the promotion/relegation playoff involving the team from the Premier Division just selects the team which finished second in the First Division, but this team will still take part in the promotion playoff in the First Division. 

 

I've tried to see if I can modify the rules in advanced rules in order to achieve what I want, but to be honest, I don't really understand how to set up or edit the rules in advanced rules, and even when I left the rules as they are and just made some changes to rules that didn't affect the leagues (e.g. work permit rules), I got an error message that was telling me the wrong number of teams were being relegated and promoted (it was telling me two teams were being relegated from the Premier Division, one team was being promoted from the First Division, and no extra teams were requested). In my latest edit, I changed the scheduling of the playoffs to see if this was causing the issue (the promotion/relegation playoff was taking place on the same days as the semi-final of the FD's promotion playoff), and in the stage settings of the Premier Division, I changed "leag" to "prpl" in the "Get Qualified Teams From Stage, SSE Airtricity First Division, xxxx, Promotion Playoff, Use position in previous stage". Now, I'm getting the following error message: 

I've made sure that dates finish before this date, as I have set the season end date to be the 30th of November, and the final match in the promotion/relegation playoff tie to finish in and around the 20th of November, with the season update day being the 1st of January.

 

Would anyone be able to help me? I'll upload the editor data file if it will be of any help: League & Data Updates - Ireland Version 5 (Advanced Rules).fmf

[sargenaldo]

This isn't possible to do in the basic editor.  The BE only works with even numbered playoff teams. In the AE, you can qualify 3 teams in one stage and then seed them by their league position. I believe the editor then places the 3rd and 4th teams in the first round and have the winner play the team that starts in the second round (the 2nd place team). You would then use fate actions to qualify the winner of the second round for the relegation playoff, and then another fate action to determine what happens to the winner of that round depending on their division. This does indeed get rather complex. I learned by opening up leagues with similar structures in the advanced editor, taking screenshots, and trial and error. Even then, I still get stumped.