Promotion/Relegation Playoff following one league's championship playoff

[Toronto Blizzard]

Hello,

I've done some searching through the forum and although I've found some helpful advice, I find myself stumped.

I want a promotion/relegation playoff between the Canadian Challenge League (bottom two automatically relegated, next two into a pro/rel playoff) and the National League of Canada (two groups, top four from each group into the championship playoff, winner and finalist automatically promoted, losing semi-finalists into pro/rel playoff).

As best as I can tell, my settings are correct, but I keep getting the following:

I have the following in the league qualification settings:

And the following National League of Canada playoff stage fate actions:

Any insight/assistance anyone could provide would be deeply appreciated!

I've also attached the file:

Canada 4.4.fmf

[rusty217]

Number of Promotion Places should be 0. That's for the group stage itself. As is it's trying to promote the top 2 in each group. It would then put the 3rd-7th placed teams into a playoff, but gets confused when they're declared champions/promoted.

You should double check the Set League Fate instructions as well. There should be an option to transfer that fate to another stage, you want to make sure that's on and the fate is transferred to Stage 0.

I'd also highly recommend looking at a league with pro/rel playoffs between leagues (eg. the Bundesliga), there are some extra settings you need to apply to make them still work when the lower division isn't loaded as a playable league.

[Toronto Blizzard]

Thanks for the tip on promotion places in the league settings and suggesting looking at Germany, @rusty217!  I had to make a couple of other corrections.  It's easy to forget that if you change the name of a stage in one place you have to really go through all the screens with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it's changed everywhere!

Ah, spoke too soon - the upper league verified but it's now saying the lower league had 0 promotions.

Back to the drawing board.

Edited June 19 by Toronto Blizzard
Got ahead of myself

[Toronto Blizzard]

It's weird because sometimes the error says that four teams are relegated from the Challenge League, sometimes three, and sometimes two, which implies that the promotion/relegation playoff is happening (and sometimes the Challenge League teams are losing), but something in the fate actions in the two cups is not sending the promoted teams up.

[keon]

Sorry for the lack of advice on this, I looked at your file earlier and compared it to my promotion/relegation file I've created for the Prem and Champ and I couldn't spot anything obvious.

One thing I will mention though, and I couldn't resolve on my file, I tried to increase the number (can't remember the amount, 3 or 4 maybe) of promotion/relegations between the Prem and Champand it didn't like it, it would come up with similar issues to what you're having... All the numbers matched up, everything looked fine. I decreased the number to 2 and it worked, no other changes. Maybe for testing, drop the overall  numbers of potential pro/rels and see if it works with the same format?

[Toronto Blizzard]

Thanks, @keon.  I tried your advice and removed the promotion/relegation playoff so that only two clubs were promoted via the National League playoffs.  I even tried setting it up again in basic rules (where the National League playoffs were only for promotion, not championship) and I copied all the settings faithfully and it still didn't work.

I set up the National League as two groups (of 14 teams) with extra fixture plan rules (so that they would play 8 matches against the other group) and now I'm wondering if that's causing problems.

[Toronto Blizzard]

Still working on this.  I can get the playoffs to promote teams directly, or get the playoffs to qualify teams for the upper division's pro/rel playoff, but not both.  Trying to combine the two sets of rules gets me this error: