Originally posted by NiborRis
The quality of the Blaze team is not, and should not, be relevant. There's really only a few things that matter here.
1) The Blaze lost the CCG and by standard definition did not qualify for promotion to WL.
2) There is some controversy as to why the Blaze AI had errors. It may have been human error, or it may have been intentionally damaged by someone given access to Blaze AI, or it's possible someone hacked the GLB in some way to get illicit access.
The *only* case where promoting Blaze as compensation would make sense to me is if GLB was hacked. Even then, I don't like it. GLB would need to announce the defect, announce that it was closed, and describe the defect so that we can satisfy ourselves that it no longer works. At a minimum.
Having someone on your staff sabotage your AI is Human Error - the owner trusted the wrong guy. It's annoying and I would hope the person at fault was discovered and wouldn't want to be associated with them or their teams myself.
As far as promotions for replacing guts/dropdowns - I would prefer the following policy:
If it's a WL team, allow a team from their conference to stay in their place, if .500 or better.
If it's a promoting Pro team, promote the team they beat in the CCG.
If you run out of teams by those criteria, due to multiple guts or whatever, then 2nd choice should be other WL teams that are .500 or better. Once you run out of those - it's time for Bort to make a call on which Pro teams that lost CCGs should promote. Hopefully we never have that many guts in a single season.
I think the de facto policy is pretty close to that, but not exact, and not formalized. Blaze would be a long way down the list for a bonus promotion under that policy, unless ATKM guts. But that's not really the argument - the argument is "Was Blaze *cheated* out of a WL spot, and if so, how do we fix it?"
Fully and completely agreed!
erm... i mean +1
