#48Teams: Final Solution

Replacing 4chan Cup Qualifiers (a.k.a. "The Fetus") with Viewer Selection: an Outline

Starting Premises:
- It's desirable to use a 48-team model for the Cup so that we can have four major events per year, consisting of 32 teams per tournament.
- There are more than 48 active teams
- The 4chan Cup is a hybrid of """serious""" competition and pure entertainment and its structure ought to strike a balance between these two (sometimes opposing) elements
- There is high dissatisfaction with the qualifiers model, as it inflates the number of major events per year, exhausts team management (contributing to manager churn), and depletes hype for the larger Babby and Elite cups, depending on which teams get stuck in the qualifiers through a mixture of management and RNG.

No governing body within the Cup has ever been able to agree on which teams to cut from the Cup on a permanent basis to reduce the total number of teams to 48. Opinions differ on which teams really have fans and by what metrics one would measure the worthiness of a team to participate. To resolve this problem, I recommend that the decision to cut a team be temporary and outsourced to the viewers to ensure that the right decision is made, since the "right" decision is the one that best serves the interests of the viewers. The proposed procedure is as follows:

1) An Elite cup consists of 32 teams divided into 8 groups of 4 teams. At the conclusion of the Group Stage of the cup, the top 2 teams of each group promote to the knockouts (16 total). The remaining 16 teams are relegated to the next Babby Cup.

2) A Babby cup consists of 32 teams divided into 8 groups of 4 teams. 16 of these teams are guaranteed a spot, having been relegated from the previous Elite cup. The remaining 16 teams are selected by the viewers via a poll from a pool of candidates consisting of: teams that failed to promote from the previous Babby and teams that did not participate in the previous Babby and want to begin competing ("benched" teams).

3) Prior to the final match of each Elite cup, /merit/ will conduct a poll of the viewers, announced via the streamer. The poll will be open for 10 minutes and will only be advertised on the stream to maximize viewer participation and minimize the risk of rigging.

3A) Viewers will be asked to rank a pool of teams in terms of popularity: who the viewer would like to see compete in the upcoming Babby cup in order from most to least anticipated. The pool will consist of the 16 Babby teams that failed to promote to the current Elite cup from the previous Babby plus all eligible teams not currently part of the 48 active teams (the "benched" teams). An eligible team is a team that signed up to be included in the poll by providing a legal export, in case that team is voted into the next Babby but must compete on auto pilot due to mitigating circumstances.

3B) The top 16 most popular (read: highly anticipated) teams as determined by the viewer poll qualify for the following Babby cup. The remaining teams are "benched" until the next vote.

This process will ensure that every board has an opportunity to participate while centering that determination around the viewer rather than one group in particular. Boards wishing to attract popular support will be empowered to advocate for their team prior to the vote by a means to be specified (such as by creating hype material to be displayed on stream prior to the poll, like posters, songs, or short videos). "Benched" teams will also be encouraged to participate in the Friendlies to increase their exposure (/merit/ could even ensure that they are paired with big market teams to entice more people to watch those matches). Finally, this poll can also be used to request other types of viewer feedback as desired.

Benefits:
- This method provides teams with two ways to participate in the cup: the competitive option (gitting gud and staying Elite or yo-yoing between the Babby and Elite cups) and the entertainment option (being a fun, exciting team that attracts viewer support). Thus, the two elements of the cup are balanced, rather than one element overruling the other.

- Basing entry to the Babbies on viewer support simplifies the PoI process, reduces the possibility of data falsification, and gives small market teams an advantage by expanding their pool of potential support from people who happen to be browsing their board in time to spot an illicit cup thread to the entirety of the cup audience.

- Polling viewers gives teams a more even playing field, since each team has equal access to the viewers via the stream. This removes the factors of board speed, board size, and intensity of moderation from giving some teams an advantage over others in making threads and building support.

- Few people like only one team in the cup. This method gives small market teams another advantage, because they can draw support from fans that might be otherwise attributed exclusively to big markets.

- One of the primary concerns with the qualifiers model is that viewer attention to the cup can be lost when "unpopular" teams crowd out "more popular teams" in Babby and Elite cups. By polling viewers, you are 100% guaranteed that the teams participating in each cup are the ones that will draw the largest number of viewers, either through being a strong competitive team or by being a highly entertaining team.

- Viewer tastes change over time and new viewers come as old viewers go. Polling viewers will keep the active cup teams current and will likely see lots of rotation in the bottom 16 of each Babby, giving "benched" teams recurring opportunities to jump in.

- The polling is done by /merit/, which removes the element of the unknown that currently exists with PoI polls conducted on boards.