How a public match works

Most dubbing happens in a private room: somebody brings a clip, invites their friends, and the room votes at the end. A public match is the opposite of that in every way that could otherwise decide a result. You do not pick the material, you do not know who you are up against, nobody is in charge of the room, and the winner is not chosen by a show of hands.

What you need is an account, a microphone and a browser. Guests can join private rooms, but a rank has to belong to somebody, so ranked asks you to sign in first.

1. The queue, and the offer that improves

Press find a match and you join one queue shared by everybody playing. The matchmaker looks for players near your rating: it starts by pairing you within 150 points and widens by 120 every fifteen seconds, so a quiet ladder still produces a match rather than leaving you waiting for an exact opponent who is not online.

It also relaxes on size, and the screen tells you when. A full lobby is four. Wait a minute and it will start with three; wait five and it will start with two. That countdown is shown rather than hidden behind a spinner, because a wait you can see the end of is a wait people sit through.

Anybody still in their first five matches gets a much wider band on purpose. Their rating is a guess, and holding a guess to a tight band means a long wait for an opponent who may be nothing like them anyway.

2. Four scenes, and the losers choose

Nobody brings a clip. The lobby is dealt four scenes from the library — real scenes marked up by other players, with the number of lines and characters shown on each card — and everybody picks one. Most picks wins, and a tie is broken by drawing between the tied cards rather than by whoever clicked first.

From the second round on, the choice belongs to the players who did not win the last one. It is the one advantage in the whole mode, and it goes to the people behind.

Anything the lobby has played in the last fortnight is kept off the slate, so a scene you have already learned does not come back around while you still remember it.

3. Everybody plays everybody

In a private room the cast is split up: you get one character, somebody else gets another. Ranked does not do that. Every player performs every character in the scene, which is the only way the comparison at the end is between people doing identical work rather than between people who happened to draw the good part.

4. The booth

You record alone, hearing nobody else, with the scene in front of you and the lines marked where they fall. The window is roughly eight times the length of the clip — between a minute and a half and five minutes — because retakes are the point rather than a concession. Nothing is submitted until the window ends or you say you are done.

5. The reveal

Everybody's version plays back to the whole lobby, one after another. This is the part people stay for, and it is deliberately given a floor of two minutes however short the scene was — a five-second clip watched four times is twenty seconds of footage and nothing like twenty seconds of a round.

6. The score, and then the next one

There is no vote. The server measures every performance against the original — timing, intonation, dynamics, rhythm, and a read on the expression — and the order of those scores is the order of the match. Points move accordingly, and the results screen shows the breakdown rather than a bare number.

A lobby plays three matches together and is then returned to the queue. Playing five in a row against the same people would make a rating mostly a statement about those particular opponents, which is not what it claims to be.

Nobody is host, and that is the point

A private room has somebody with a cursor who can start a round early, skip a reveal or close the vote at a convenient moment. There is no such seat here. Every phase is driven by a clock on the server, ends as soon as everybody has finished, and moves on by itself if somebody wanders off.

A player who disconnects has forty-five seconds before the match stops counting them — comfortably more than a reload or a phone changing network, comfortably less than the run of a round. If a lobby empties to the point where there is nothing left to compare, the match ends there rather than making the last player perform to nobody.

What the server does not see

The scene comes down from the library. Your recording travels between browsers exactly as it does in a private room, and the match records only who was in it, how they placed and what it did to their rating. Nothing you perform is uploaded, published or kept.

The two questions this raises next are what the points actually do and how the scoring makes its mind up — both of which have their own guide.