So, it seems like another season of the Blackbox Trophy is coming to an end, and with that the second Steel Gauntlet playoff is about to take place.

For this season (actually pretty much as of today), coaches who participate in the BBT will be able to set priorities for which team they would want to bring to the Gauntlet without needing to completely opt out with their highest scoring team(s).

The short of it is that the "Playoff Settings" (under Game->Blackbox Trophy->My Squad) will let you reorder your teams, as well as opt in/opt out from the playoffs. Naturally, these priorities will not guarantee you a spot in the playoff, but at least you will be able to tell the system that you'd rather play a team that scored lower than your best team without having to entirely opt out with the higher scoring teams. I expect that this will be an improvement to those of you who have lots of teams that are within range to qualify.

For those of you who are more technically interested in how it works, I've implemented the Gale-Shapley algorithm, which is a way to solve what's called the "Stable Matching Problem"; a problem that the Gauntlet qualifier with priorities can be described as a version of. Specifically, teams are considered the "proposing side", while qualifier slots (one for each roster, and filling up with wildcards that accept all rosters) are considered the "reviewing side". I won't go into the details here, so if you're interested in exactly how it works, you can read how it works on the Wikipedia page linked earlier.

As always, feel free to get in touch if you find issues with this (even though the real "work" of it will show when the qualifying teams are picked).