How the ranked ladder works

There are two numbers behind a rank and only one of them is yours to see. The visible one is points: it starts at zero, it goes up when you place well, and it is what the leaderboard is sorted on. The hidden one is an ordinary Elo estimate the matchmaker uses to decide who you play against, and it is deliberately never shown — a rating is only legible next to the distribution it came from, and nobody wants to read a distribution.

The six rungs

Six rungs is short for a ladder, and that is deliberate. A twenty-rung ladder exists to manufacture a promotion every few sessions; this one is spaced so that the first arrives in an evening and the last is something almost nobody has.

Be honest about what the first two rungs are: since nothing is subtracted on either of them, everybody passes through eventually. They are an on-ramp, not a contest. Real competition starts at Supporting, which is the point at which a loss begins to take something back.

What a match is worth

Twenty-five points are on the table and the field shares them out symmetrically. First place takes the full twenty-five, last place gives twenty-five back, and everybody between moves proportionally — in a four-player match second gains about eight and third loses about eight. In a match of three, the middle place moves nothing at all.

Then the tier is applied to the losses only. Gains are never scaled down by rank. So a last place worth −25 is:

• —0 on Extra and Understudy — and on Extra a genuinely good performance still earns a few points for coming last.
• —−6 on Supporting.
• —−13 on Lead.
• —−19 on Star.
• —−25 on Legend, where every point you lose is a point somebody else took.

The consolation on the bottom rung is earned rather than attended. It pays nothing below a score of 40, and rises from there — so it rewards somebody who performed well and still came last, and does nothing for somebody who queued up and said nothing.

The first five matches

Placement is five matches, which is about one evening. During them the hidden rating moves roughly three times as far per match as it will later, because nothing is known about you yet and the fastest way to a match against people at your level is to find out quickly.

Your rank is not withheld while that happens. You are on the ladder from the first match — there is nothing to be sorted into, because everybody starts at the bottom and climbs, and being told you are “Unranked” for an evening withholds the reward while keeping none of the risk.

Why the hidden number exists at all

It does two jobs. It decides who you are matched with, and it decides how fast you climb through ranks you have already outgrown. If the estimate says you are considerably better than your current tier, your gains are multiplied by up to 1.6; if it says the opposite, they are reduced, but never below 0.7.

That asymmetry is on purpose. Climbing too slowly reads as a broken ladder and is genuinely boring; climbing slightly too fast just arrives somewhere the matchmaker was already putting you. Losses are never multiplied by it — two players who lose the same match by the same margin drop by the same amount, because anything else is what makes a ladder feel rigged.

Promotion, and how hard it is to lose one

A tier you have reached is held until your points fall thirty below its threshold, so nobody flickers across a boundary match after match. On top of that, you cannot be demoted on the day you were promoted — the points still fall, because the loss was real, but they stop at the threshold of the rank you just earned.

Points cannot go below zero, so the worst available outcome is being back where you started.

Playing all night

After six matches in a day, gains start shrinking — down to about a third at the far end, and never to nothing. It is aimed at grinding rather than at playing: six is already a long evening, and somebody who wants a seventh should still be paid for it, just not as though the day had started again.

Getting on the leaderboard

One ranked match puts you on it. Staying on it means playing within thirty days — long enough that a fortnight away costs you nothing, short enough that the board describes who is playing now rather than who played once in the spring.

It is sorted on points, because points are the number you actually have. A public board ranked on a number nobody can see is a board nobody can argue with, and arguing with it is half the fun.

One thing that does not pay

A submission that is near-certainly the original audio played back rather than performed earns nothing for that match — no gain, no loss. Nobody in the room is told, nothing is recorded against the account, and everybody else's result stands exactly as it was. It is the smallest action that removes the incentive, which is the right size for a check that runs on a heuristic.