Quote:
Originally Posted by Hertston
TBH though, I still don't get where the 'balance' issue actually is?
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Sorry I've been slow, Hertston, work's been fun n games this week.
I'm really talking about gold. Folks in diamond may scoff, but gold's been a lot of fun for me this year. You can use a ton more cards and it's a bit better for Friend League action than diamond. But all those cards can become like sacrificial lambs when a meta diamond team rolls into town!
Between the yoyo silver teams and the yoyo diamond teams, gold is quite strung out as standard. But .500 gold teams can generally give it a decent go against the yoyo diamond teams, so there's still some competitive uncertainty. Drop an accomplished diamond team in there (or several) and things can get messy. I just think that PT can do a bit better at how it defines relegation worthy teams, and smooth the transition between the levels somewhat.
Like you've mentioned, the only obvious 'problem' with diamond is the league allocation that results in significantly stronger/weaker leagues. Relegation works just fine with a balanced league that has a range of teams from good to bad. But here's a slightly extreme example of how the current system can work badly with stronger/weaker leagues:
Diamond league A has 25 good teams (consistent playoff contenders) that finish .475 or above, 5 have to go down.
Diamond league B has 15 bad teams (mostly lucky promotions from gold) that finish .400 or below, 5 have to stay up.
In that case, it's pretty clear that cutting the 20 teams with the lowest win percentage, from the entire pool, would be more effective at weeding out the weaker teams than relegating the bottom 10 from each league separately. If this was scaled up to 24+ leagues, I'd expect balanced leagues to still relegate around 10 teams, with the variation coming mainly from the more extreme leagues. I'm certain that it would be good for balance at the gold level, and all the others!