[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by old timer

Getting back on topic...

Promotion/relegation is supposed to remove teams from a league level that they no longer belong at, but the method of determining this, seems flawed. A team's record over a single season is not the best indicator of how good they are and how deep they went into the playoffs is even a poorer indicator of how good they are.

Promoting a team based on playoff success is a good idea if there was an actual reward for moving to a higher league. But since there's not a reward for going to a higher league then wouldn't it be better to promote teams only if they're truly outclassing the others at their level?

So for example, let's say you're in a bronze league and your team quality is truly way better than almost all the other teams at the bronze level. Then promoting your team to a higher level makes since, otherwise you'd just be beating up on the bronze teams earning lots of PP very easily.

But if you have a team that wins the bronze championship, but your team quality is not as good as the average silver team quality level (which could be determined by overall ratings, for example - not perfect, but a start), then should you be automatically promoted to silver?

It would be nice if it were possible to have promotion not be automatic if your team quality level isn't higher than the other teams at the level you're currently at, even if you won it all. So only automatically promote teams that are significantly better than the level they're at, based on the quality of the cards they have.

Unfortunately, this would lead to much fewer promotions to higher levels and that might be a bad thing (though I'm not sure how?). So what other problems might such a system have? Also, if a team is so good that their quality level compares to diamond teams and they just left the entry pool, should they just start at the diamond level? What problems would this create?

Bingo. My very early issue was that promotions were based on playoff wins. We all repeat over and over that anything can happen in a short series - yet we rely on the results of a short series to group competitive teams..... seems wrong, no?