One club, one number, per game

Win and your club rating goes up. Lose and it goes down. Beat a stronger club and you gain more; beat a weaker one and you gain less — and the same in reverse, so losing to a club well below you costs the most.

Nothing else feeds into it: not who played, not how long you were away, and not how convincing the scoreline was. The queue pairs clubs on rating alone and never looks at your lineup.

Every club starts at 1000, in every game it enters. A club that has not played yet is still rated 1000 — the ladder simply has no evidence about it either way.

A club’s first matches in a title move it further than later ones, so a new club reaches roughly the right place quickly instead of grinding toward it.

A season is a calendar month. When a new one starts every club returns to 1000, so the ladder says what happened this month rather than what happened ever.

A club with no match this season is not on the ladder and has no tier. That is what stops a club reaching the top, stopping, and keeping the position.

You lock to a club when you play your first rated match for it in a season. While the lock holds, neither you nor the club’s staff can end that membership — it binds both sides, because a lock only one side could break would not be a lock.

It is what stops clubs borrowing strong players for one night. It lasts at most the season, and ends sooner if the club goes fourteen days without a rated match: it exists to protect an active rating, not to trap anybody in a quiet club.

Tiers are named bands over your current rating — Bronze through Elite. They are labels, not gates: they never decide who you are allowed to play, and they follow the number up and down on their own.

The maths underneath is standard Elo, unchanged. Keeping it plain is deliberate: every rating on the site can be recalculated from the matches that produced it, so a result you can point at is a rating you can check.