The ranked ladder
One-versus-one, eight maps, three-month seasons, and a badge that shows whether a player finishes what they start.
Everything in the table below is invented. The online server does not exist yet. The names, ratings and records are made up to show how the ladder will look. No real player appears here, and nothing on this page is live.
Season 0, preview
| Player | People | Record |
|---|
A profile
Click a name and you see the badge with a plain sentence next to it, and the last ten games as they were: finished, or not. Nothing hidden, nothing shaming. A bad week shows, and so does the recovery.
Sample profile
Weigher
Hesh · rating 1742 ± 48
Steadfast Finishes 49 of their last 50 games
Last ten games, newest on the right
The commitment score, in full
The rules are public on purpose. Transparency is the reason players will trust a visible badge.
What is counted
Every quick match and ranked match counts. Private games with friends do not. The window is your last 50 matchmade games, and the oldest ten count half.
| Event | What it means | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Early quit | You surrendered or left before six minutes of game time (eight in 2v2). | 1.0 |
| Abandon | The connection dropped with no leave message, and you did not return in time (90 s per drop, 180 s per match). | 1.5 |
| Abandon, bad network | The same, but the server saw your connection degrade first. | 0.75 |
| Idle | Fewer than three meaningful commands a minute for three minutes, while you own a production building. You get a “Still there?” prompt first. | 0.5 |
| Dodge | You declined a found match, or left while loading. | 0.25 |
| Completed | You were there at the end: a win, a loss, or a surrender after the six-minute mark. | 0 |
| Reconnected | You dropped and came back inside the window. | 0 |
| No fault | A server fault, a desync, a mutual remake in the first 90 seconds, or both players dropping within five seconds. | 0 |
The formula
penalty = 1.0 x early quits
+ 1.5 x abandons
+ 0.75 x abandons (bad network)
+ 0.5 x idle
+ 0.25 x dodges
score = 100 - 100 x penalty / max(games, 10)
(kept between 0 and 100)The max(games, 10) means one early mistake cannot wreck a new account.
The badges
| Badge | When |
|---|---|
| New | Fewer than 10 games |
| Steadfast | 95 or more, with at least 20 games |
| Reliable | 85 to 94 |
| Unsteady | 70 to 84 |
| Flaky | Below 70 |
Score calculator
Enter counts from the last 50 games. This simplified version ignores the half weight of the oldest ten games.
Steadfast
How it is used
- Soft partition. Flaky players are matched with each other, or with Unsteady players after three minutes of searching. Steadfast and Reliable players are matched among themselves first.
- Cooldowns. Two early quits or abandons in 24 hours: 10 minutes out of the queue. Three: 30 minutes. Five: a day.
- Recovery. Every finished game pushes the oldest penalty out. The game shows, for example, “complete 3 games to reach Reliable”.
- Rating. If someone leaves before six minutes, they take a rated loss and you take no rating change. After six minutes you get a rated win.
What cannot be abused
- Nobody can lower someone else’s score. Reports never change it; only the server’s own observations do.
- A lost rush can be conceded. Surrendering before six minutes is not an early quit if your score is under a quarter of your opponent’s.
- Pulling the cable is still an abandon. The bad-network discount needs the server to have seen trouble before the drop.
- New accounts start in a New pool and play five placement games. Ranked needs a verified email, and commitment carries across seasons.
How online will work
Design summary. None of it is built yet; see the roadmap for when.
Lockstep through a relay
Browsers connect over secure WebSockets to a relay. Each turn lasts 200 ms and carries only player commands, under 5 KB a second per player. Every client runs the same simulation.
The server checks the game
It runs a headless copy of the sim, drops impossible orders, owns the clock, compares game-state hashes, and writes the replay. Only the server’s result changes ratings.
Drops are survivable
If a player drops, the match pauses with a countdown. On return the server sends a snapshot plus a tail of commands, and the client fast-forwards at four times speed or more.
- Every matchmade game is stored for 90 days; the top 100 stay forever. Replays play in the browser at their exact game version.
- No free text chat in version one: pings and a wheel of twelve fixed lines instead.
- Cheat detection is statistical: orders aimed at things you could not see, bot-like command timing, and manual review of the flagged.