Inactivity decay

Decay keeps ladders honest: if a strong player stops showing up, their standing shouldn't block the players actively competing below them. So while you're away, your visible standing gradually drops — but your real rating is never lost.

Visible rating vs your real rating

PickleFriend tracks two things:

• Your real rating (the true measure of your strength). Decay never touches this.
• Your visible rating — what shows in standings — which is your real rating reduced by however much decay you've accumulated while inactive.

Standings and movement use the visible rating, so an inactive player slides down over time and can eventually be relegated. But because the real rating is untouched, nothing is actually lost.

It snaps back the instant you play

The moment you play a game again, decay is fully and instantly reversed — your visible rating jumps straight back to your real rating before that game is even scored. One game erases weeks of accumulated decay. There's no slow climb back; you return at full strength.

The rules in brief

• Brand-new entrants aren't decayed. If you haven't established a rating yet (zero games), there's nothing to decay.
• Played since the last cycle? Decay is wiped — you're treated as fully active.
• Missed it? A little more decay accumulates.
• Dropped a division purely from inactivity? You're protected from a second decay-driven drop until you play again, so a long absence can't free-fall you through multiple divisions in consecutive cycles.

Why it works this way

The goal is to reward participation without punishing people for life. A summer away shouldn't permanently wreck your rating — but it also shouldn't let you camp at the top of Div A while never playing. Decay-the-visible-number, keep-the-real-one is how the ladder gets both.

Next

See Spares and cross-division play for how filling in for another division interacts with your home standing.