Lots of testing. It’s not voodoo so much as tactical instinct plus process of elimination. I’m a big proponent of volume testing, since PES ultimately comes down to finding patterns in the behavior of the RNG. Testing never guarantees you a victory, but it can help make a victory more likely and give you an idea of what kind of changes may help and which may hurt.

As for the difference in /mlp/‘s behavior over the course of the Cup, we go out of our way to adapt our strategy to each individual opponent we face. /mlp/ changes as its opponents change. It just happened to be that the teams we faced in the knockouts fell apart under hyper aggressive pressure offense, which we discovered through exhaustive, near constant testing. I actually didn’t see almost any of the games this weekend, due to running tests throughout.

Here’s an idea of what our volume testing looks like. Pic related.

 

 
When asked how to decide when a formation is working or not, he responded:
 

I personally like to see no fewer than 7 wins in a batch of 10. This Cup, we often had to settle for 6 because the teams we faced were so strong.

fuck yeah

well deserved win too, /g/ put up quite a fight