Continental rules editor issue

[uMaliyasi]

Good day fellow managers,

 

I am a long time user of the database editor, for many years, probably around 10 years, on many FM versions. But I always kept it very simple and kept it to Nation rules level and always kept it to the basic rules editor.

 

For the first time on FM20 I got into rebuilding the African continental rules, to make it to something I like better. After having activated all 57 nations in Africa.

 

I actually did great for a first time, all aligns perfectly, from the number of teams to the different stages and so on.

 

But I am stuck with two issues:

1- After rebuilding the continental competitions, it looks like the leagues reputations in Africa are frozen. I ran tests over 5 seasons, and leagues reputations are no longer changing. I can see the reputations of leagues in other continents are still going up and down. But the Africa ones are stuck. I know for sure that this is due to something in my continental rules file, and not in my 57 country rules files. Because if I deactivate the custom continental rules and run the country rules alone, the league reputations are changing fine.

 

2 - Instead of picking teams for the continental competitions in the order of the nations club rankings, it picks team in the order I listed the countries in in the editor. For example, I need 2 teams from the 5 best leagues in Africa, and 1 team from the bottom 52 leagues, to go to the Champions league. But instead, it picks 2 team from the 5 nations I put on top of the list, and 1 team from each of the 52 other nations. In fact when I run a save to test these rules, the nations club coefficient and continental qualification places tab in the game are completely missing.

 

I spent hours upon hours doing trial and error and testing around to find a way to clean out those two issues. I still can't find anything. While it feels like I am agonizingly close.

 

Would anyone know how those things can be fixed ?

 

[Unknown Hacker]

5 hours ago, uMaliyasi said:

Good day fellow managers,

 

I am a long time user of the database editor, for many years, probably around 10 years, on many FM versions. But I always kept it very simple and kept it to Nation rules level and always kept it to the basic rules editor.

 

For the first time on FM20 I got into rebuilding the African continental rules, to make it to something I like better. After having activated all 57 nations in Africa.

 

I actually did great for a first time, all aligns perfectly, from the number of teams to the different stages and so on.

 

But I am stuck with two issues:

1- After rebuilding the continental competitions, it looks like the leagues reputations in Africa are frozen. I ran tests over 5 seasons, and leagues reputations are no longer changing. I can see the reputations of leagues in other continents are still going up and down. But the Africa ones are stuck. I know for sure that this is due to something in my continental rules file, and not in my 57 country rules files. Because if I deactivate the custom continental rules and run the country rules alone, the league reputations are changing fine.

 

2 - Instead of picking teams for the continental competitions in the order of the nations club rankings, it picks team in the order I listed the countries in in the editor. For example, I need 2 teams from the 5 best leagues in Africa, and 1 team from the bottom 52 leagues, to go to the Champions league. But instead, it picks 2 team from the 5 nations I put on top of the list, and 1 team from each of the 52 other nations. In fact when I run a save to test these rules, the nations club coefficient and continental qualification places tab in the game are completely missing.

 

I spent hours upon hours doing trial and error and testing around to find a way to clean out those two issues. I still can't find anything. While it feels like I am agonizingly close.

 

Would anyone know how those things can be fixed ?

 

Regarding your first issue, that's a known issue when creating custom continental competitions. As league reputation is linked to coefficients, and coefficients seem to be disabled by overriding default competition rules, there is nothing that can really be done to get around this problem. There is some conjecture that suggests you can build hidden stages into your competition to mimic coefficients, but I'm not sure if that gets around the league reputation freeze. Out of interest, are you editing the default African continental cups or creating your own?

Regarding your second issue, that's how seeding works in the game. The way round it is to list the 5 best leagues at the top then have all the others below.

[uMaliyasi]

29 minutes ago, Unknown Hacker said:

Regarding your first issue, that's a known issue when creating custom continental competitions. As league reputation is linked to coefficients, and coefficients seem to be disabled by overriding default competition rules, there is nothing that can really be done to get around this problem. There is some conjecture that suggests you can build hidden stages into your competition to mimic coefficients, but I'm not sure if that gets around the league reputation freeze. Out of interest, are you editing the default African continental cups or creating your own?

Regarding your second issue, that's how seeding works in the game. The way round it is to list the 5 best leagues at the top then have all the others below.

Thanks for the reply.

 

I am so close and yet so far.

 

I have actually used the two existing continental cups and used those ones to be rebuilt.

 

Do you think it would make a difference if I just create cups from scratch in the DB and not use the existing ones ?

[uMaliyasi]

I thought of just listing the Nations in order manually, to have the current top Nations having the number of entries I want.

This is my backup plan if I can't crack this. But it will bother me a bit to have frozen seedings and frozen reputations.

But by your feedback, it seems I might be stuck with it...

Do you know if that is a new problem that came up in the newer versions of FM ? I remember some years back I had downloaded a good Caribbean pack from someone, they had added the CFU Caribbean Club Championship, and rebuild the Concacaf CL entirely to have the correct Caribbean entries.

And they had the North American Leagues reputations still working fine.

[Unknown Hacker]

3 hours ago, uMaliyasi said:

Thanks for the reply.

 

I am so close and yet so far.

 

I have actually used the two existing continental cups and used those ones to be rebuilt.

 

Do you think it would make a difference if I just create cups from scratch in the DB and not use the existing ones ?

There is some conjecture that making new competitions rather than using existing ones may solve the problem. But you'd have to test it. Personally I'm not sure if it can be changed, but have a look at any threads about 'Dynamic Qualification', particularly one started by krlenjushka. That will tell you how to get all the teams you want into the first competition - after that it just depends if the dynamic league reputation works.

[Unknown Hacker]

3 hours ago, uMaliyasi said:

I thought of just listing the Nations in order manually, to have the current top Nations having the number of entries I want.

This is my backup plan if I can't crack this. But it will bother me a bit to have frozen seedings and frozen reputations.

But by your feedback, it seems I might be stuck with it...

Do you know if that is a new problem that came up in the newer versions of FM ? I remember some years back I had downloaded a good Caribbean pack from someone, they had added the CFU Caribbean Club Championship, and rebuild the Concacaf CL entirely to have the correct Caribbean entries.

And they had the North American Leagues reputations still working fine.

As far as I know this has been an issue ever since continental cups were made editable. Workarounds used to exist but have gradually stopped working.

[uMaliyasi]

12 hours ago, Unknown Hacker said:

There is some conjecture that making new competitions rather than using existing ones may solve the problem. But you'd have to test it. Personally I'm not sure if it can be changed, but have a look at any threads about 'Dynamic Qualification', particularly one started by krlenjushka. That will tell you how to get all the teams you want into the first competition - after that it just depends if the dynamic league reputation works.

Alright thanks for the tip.

I had already done lots of online research and I had not found it.

I did a lot more reading now. Including this:

But it seems this would only work if the reputations stay dynamic. As this trick is entirely based on seeding all league winners together, and then all runners-up together.

Have all winners enter the competition in a hidden round 0 that sends them all automatically to round 2 (the first real round) without playing.

Have all runners-up enter the competition in a hidden round 1 that sorts team in order of league reputation, then automatically pick the top 5 and send them to round 2 (the first real round) without playing.

As a result the actual competition would indeed have all league winners plus the runners-up of the top 5 ranked nations.

This is freaking brilliant. But now since having custom continental competitions deactivates league reputations dynamics, this is rendered useless. It would always be the same nations having 2 team entered.

It appears that back in FM16  there was ways to get around that by creating new competitions in the DB and not use the existing ones. But I tested this in many different ways yesterday night, and this does not seem to work for FM 20. Even if I create a completely unrelated continental competition for Africa, and leave the existing ones active to be played in parallel. Even that deactivates leagues reputation changes while the standard cups are still playing.

Any further tip by anyone is welcome, but it really looks like there is just no way to do what I am trying to do... Anymore.

 

[uMaliyasi]

In the meantime, I am going to try somewhat of a compromise.

The reason I wanted to rebuild the African continental competitions in the first place, is that in the standards rules in the game, instead of picking something like: 

-The competition last winner

-Two teams from the top 6 nations

-One team from the remaining 51 nations

For a total of 64 teams.

 

It actually picks:

-The competition last winner

-Two teams from the top 11 nations

-One team from the next 41 nations

-Nothing from the bottom 5 nations

 

For a total of 64 teams.

 

And this is exactly the same for both the Champions League and the Confederations Cup. And as a result the bottom 5 nations never play any continental game and therefore never stand a chance to earn any continental coefficient. And therefore they are locked out of continental contention for ever.

 

Which is a deal breaker for me.

 

This is basically what I wanted to solve, I wanted to twitch the rules just to have all nations enter one team.

 

Now if I rebuild the continental competition, the number of spots are completely frozen, AND league reputations are frozen as well, which is quite a downer.

 

So what I want to try to do is go to each of my 57 nation rules files, and set the specific number of continental qualifications to the Champions League and Confederations Cup for each league and cup at nation level. To feed exactly the 63 teams needed to each comp while leaving the spot available for the last competition's winner.

And then keep the original continent rules and not have custom rules for it.

 

That would have fixed numbers of qualifications per country, but at least all nations would have a team, and leagues reputations might still be dynamic as there would be no custom continental rules.

 

That's a long shot, but that might do the trick.

 

I am just unsure what will happen if the winner of the competition is also qualified through their domestic league. Will the spot go to the losing finalist ? Or will the team be drafted twice to the next edition of the competition. What if the losing finalist is also already qualified ? Will the spot go to the next team in that league ? Or to the next team in the top ranked league ?

Maybe I set the nations qualifications rules to "Best Ranked" by "League Positions" instead of using "Winner" "runner-up".

 

Will the continental cups even recognize and prioritize the nation level qualifying rules if the continent rules are not customized ?

 

A lot can go wrong, I will have a lot of testing to do.

[Domoboy23]

On 02/07/2020 at 10:17, uMaliyasi said:

In the meantime, I am going to try somewhat of a compromise.

The reason I wanted to rebuild the African continental competitions in the first place, is that in the standards rules in the game, instead of picking something like: 

-The competition last winner

-Two teams from the top 6 nations

-One team from the remaining 51 nations

For a total of 64 teams.

 

It actually picks:

-The competition last winner

-Two teams from the top 11 nations

-One team from the next 41 nations

-Nothing from the bottom 5 nations

 

For a total of 64 teams.

 

And this is exactly the same for both the Champions League and the Confederations Cup. And as a result the bottom 5 nations never play any continental game and therefore never stand a chance to earn any continental coefficient. And therefore they are locked out of continental contention for ever.

 

Which is a deal breaker for me.

 

This is basically what I wanted to solve, I wanted to twitch the rules just to have all nations enter one team.

 

Now if I rebuild the continental competition, the number of spots are completely frozen, AND league reputations are frozen as well, which is quite a downer.

 

So what I want to try to do is go to each of my 57 nation rules files, and set the specific number of continental qualifications to the Champions League and Confederations Cup for each league and cup at nation level. To feed exactly the 63 teams needed to each comp while leaving the spot available for the last competition's winner.

And then keep the original continent rules and not have custom rules for it.

 

That would have fixed numbers of qualifications per country, but at least all nations would have a team, and leagues reputations might still be dynamic as there would be no custom continental rules.

 

That's a long shot, but that might do the trick.

 

I am just unsure what will happen if the winner of the competition is also qualified through their domestic league. Will the spot go to the losing finalist ? Or will the team be drafted twice to the next edition of the competition. What if the losing finalist is also already qualified ? Will the spot go to the next team in that league ? Or to the next team in the top ranked league ?

Maybe I set the nations qualifications rules to "Best Ranked" by "League Positions" instead of using "Winner" "runner-up".

 

Will the continental cups even recognize and prioritize the nation level qualifying rules if the continent rules are not customized ?

 

A lot can go wrong, I will have a lot of testing to do.

Not too far off a year later... Did you have any joy?