Ladder Leagues

Promotion and relegation

How a cycle ranks each division, picks who moves up and down, and transfers them between tiers.

Updated 2026-06-08

When the organizer triggers a cycle, the ladder reshuffles: strong players rise, struggling players drop, and every division gets a little more competitive.

What happens in a cycle

  1. Standings are calculated. Each division is ranked by visible rating — your rating adjusted for any inactivity decay you picked up during the cycle.
  2. Movers are identified. The bottom of each higher division is marked for relegation; the top of each lower division is marked for promotion. You choose how many slots move at each boundary.
  3. Start ratings are set. Movers don't reset to zero or parachute in at the top — they step into the rating spot vacated by someone heading the other way. See Start ratings when you move.
  4. Transfers execute. Everyone moves into their new division and the next cycle begins.

How many move?

The number of promotion and relegation slots per boundary is configurable. The system also protects divisions from emptying out: it will always leave at least one qualifying player in a division, so a small division moves fewer people than the configured count.

No-shows: who's eligible to move

You can decide how players who didn't play at all since the last cycle are treated, with two organizer options:

  • Promote inactive players? Off by default — someone who didn't play a single session this cycle isn't promoted on standing alone; they're held in place. Showing up even once counts as active, so sitting out only the latest session doesn't exclude you.
  • Relegate inactive players? On by default — staying away the whole cycle doesn't shield you from relegation, which keeps no-shows from blocking the players below them. Turn it off to protect inactive players from dropping.

"Played since the last cycle" is the same signal the public standings page reflects, so what you see previewed is what the cycle does.

Decayed vs defeated

A player can drop a division two ways: by genuinely losing games, or by being inactive long enough that decay pulls their visible standing down. Both land in the lower division with the same start rating — the only difference is that a player relegated purely from inactivity is protected from a second decay-driven drop until they play again, so they don't free-fall through the ladder while away. See Inactivity decay.

Min-games eligibility and the "Settling in" gate

New arrivals need time to establish a real rating. Until a player (or team) has played enough games across the whole ladder, they're marked as 🐣 Settling in and kept out of the promotion and relegation ranking entirely. They can't be promoted, and they can't be relegated — the cycle passes them by until they've earned enough results for standings to mean something.

The default threshold is 3 games, and the organizer can change it when creating or editing the ladder. Setting it to 0 disables the gate entirely.

How the count works:

  • Games are totalled ladder-wide, not per-division. A player who spares into a sibling division and racks up games there has those counted toward their eligibility — they don't arrive back in their home division still looking like a newcomer. This holds even after a fill-in row is retired at the end of a cycle: those games keep counting toward the player's ladder-wide total, so a spare's play is never lost from their eligibility.
  • The gate lifts automatically via decay too. A player who has been inactive long enough that their inactivity decay has become meaningful is treated as established regardless of game count. The ladder won't keep a decayed player behind a newcomer shield — their standing (and potential relegation) is real enough to rank.

The 🐣 badge on the standings page is the live signal: if you see it next to a player's name, they're still in the settling-in window and won't move at the next cycle.

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