Rigged Wiki:News/Autumn 2017 Information

There's this thing called The Autumn Babby Cup that I'm supposed to tell you about and stuff, so here's the rundown.

Dates:

Qualifier Deadline/Preliminary Babby Export Deadline: October 6th, 23:59:59 wiki time
Aesthetics Deadline for teams playing in the Qualifiers: October 7th, 23:59:59 wiki time
Qualifier Draw: October 7th, a Saturday
Qualifier weekend: Friday the 13th of October to the 15th
Babby Final Export Deadline: October 20th, 23:59:59 wiki time
Babby Draw: October 21st, a Saturday
Aesthetics Deadline for teams playing in the Babby: October 21st, 23:59:59 wiki time
Babby First Weekend: October 27th–29th
Babby Second Weekend: November 3rd–5th
Babby Knockout Weekend: November 11th–12th

Rule Changes:
Currently the green height system or "height abuse" is seen as too good, it compliments the wide crossing game that PES 17 favours by allowing comparatively taller players to better contest for headers and crosses while also giving a powerful way to stop those by making your defenders and keepers taller than opposing strikers using the red height system. We understand that is a powerful tool but it is not being outright removed or nerfed to the point that we might as well remove it. Instead, we are adjusting it slightly. The rules page will be adjusted to reflect these changes.

The 200-205cm bracket is removed, green heights will now have two players in the 195-199 bracket, and a new resulting total height of 4190.
This change will limit the amount that a player can tower over shorter, non-HA players by. As seen in Tinker/toy/'s testing height gaps are a key in goal scoring from crossing teams and by lowering the maximum of that gap a hopefully better parity will be achieved. It should be noted that making your CBs manlets remains a stupid idea.

GKs can no longer be taller than 189cm.
HA GKs are a universal choice for green height teams, they're a no brainer for every team using this bracket and unless literally everyone is wrong they are seemingly unquestionably better than not making your GK extremely tall. Now green height teams will face a tougher choice in how to spread their 190+ players and face a potentially weaker overall team by doing so.

Potential change to qualifiers' structure | seeking feedback | Must read | HD 4K | 60fps:
/merit/ is seeking feedback on a potential change to the Qualifiers structure for next Spring. This potential change consists in giving teams that fail to advance from any qualifying session, starting from the upcoming one, an automatic slot in the following babby Cup. This idea is not without downsides that must be considered, so here is an example of how this would affect the qualifier structure going forward followed by the main pros (+) and cons (-) as we see them:

If we make an example using the current number of pot 4 and below teams for next Spring and unchanged amount of teams by then this is what we would be seeing, assuming maximum qualifier size:

Spring 18 (without the rule change): 13 teams for 8 slots, the five teams who fail to qualify are placed in the following qualifiers.

Spring 18 (with byes for the three teams who failed to promote in Autumn 17): 10 teams for 5 slots, the five teams who fail to qualify are given slots in the next babby.

This seems fine but the issues come to light in the following qualifiers, under the same assumptions as before.

Autumn 18 (without the rule change): 13 teams for 8 slots, the five teams who fail to qualify are placed in the following qualifiers.

Autumn 18 (five byes): 8 teams for 3 slots, the five teams who fail to qualify are given slots in the next babby. (This same 8->3 situation repeats during the following qualifying sessions.)

+ It would stop the qualifiers from being a potential ghetto for teams to get stuck in, regardless of their market size.
- By giving teams automatic spots in the babby, it reduces the amount of available spots that teams in qualifiers can compete for, potentially causing a cycle of failure where being in the qualifiers results in a high chance of sitting out the following babby.
+ On the other hand, making the qualifiers harder to promote from could result in failures being seen less negatively than now. Teams which were relegated have nothing to be ashamed of and they have the following babby Cup to look forward to, instead of yet another qualifying session they could fail to promote from.
- Giving teams that fall into the qualifiers a six month wait at something they have a bad chance of advancing from could be a situation that those teams might enjoy even less than the currrent qualifier structure, even though failing to promote results in automatic promotion in the future.
- This would also mean new and revived teams could be unlikely to see a babby until more than 6 months from their founding or revival.

• A way to increase the odds of survival could be giving the automatic promotion only to teams that fail to get out of a qualifier twice in a row. This would still reduce the harshness of future qualifiers with respect to the current situation, while reducing the risk of having too few spots to compete for, but it would have a slower turnover for teams that are struggling and it doesn't prevent teams from potentially spending a whole year without having played in the babby Cup even once.
  
  
• Another option would be increasing the general size of the qualifying session. This means that whenever the amount of available slots is smaller than half that of the participating teams 4 extra teams are added to it, so in the previous example the qualifying session would change from 8->3 to 12->7. Instead of just taking the 8 teams that ended 4th place in their own groups, those 12 teams would be determined by overall placement in the previous babby Cup, which would also prevent cases of teams being relegated to the qualifiers after getting 4 points in the group stage. This boosts the chances of any team to promote from the qualifiers, but also means that, depending on the total amount of teams, a 3rd place finish in a group doesn't guarantee avoiding the qualifiers anymore.
  
  

As for megababbies, they are the best choice when there are 40 teams, or even just 39 by adding some randomly chosen autopilot team, but they're not viable with the lower amount we currently have.

This change would go into effect starting from the Spring 18 Cup, so any teams that fail to promote from the Autumn 17 Qualifiers would be granted a spot in it. The decision will be made before those teams are known.

Us folks in /merit/ would like to hear what you think of this proposed change and the variations on it, what do you like, what do you hate, what obvious things are we missing? Tell us your thoughts in the comment section below or more realisitically bring your thoughts to /4ccg/ or the suggestionbox channel on the 4cc Discord, or just anywhere where the members of /merit/ will see it. We want to know what people think of all of this and where you stand on something that has very explicit pros and cons. Is the tradeoff worth it to you? Are any of the other options better? Should this be implemented for this Autumn? These are some but not all of what we're looking to learn from asking you all this.