How the platform works

An account holds one primary capability: player, Tournament Organizer, Tournament Director, Moderator, or Support. Players compete, organizers run events, and directors lead the events they are assigned to.

Staff roles are tournament-scoped rather than organization-wide. A Tournament Director, Results Manager, Moderator, or Support member sees only the events they are assigned to and only the actions their role allows, so authority comes from the assignment and not from the account.

Every team sits on one rung of a seven-step ladder: T3/Open, T2, T1, Elites, Supremes, Champions, and Global Toppers. A new team starts at T3/Open, and the tier belongs to the team rather than to the players, so it survives roster changes.

Tier decides which events a team may enter. An organizer sets the tier range an event accepts, and the backend applies that range when the application is made and again when it is approved.

Promotion is earned through results, never requested. A team that finishes high enough in a finalized grouped round moves up, and the change is written through the same versioned tier helper as every other tier decision.

Tournament completion, promotions, the audit record, and the achievement enqueue commit in one transaction, so a promotion cannot land without its history.

Demotion is deliberately narrow. Only the bottom four teams of a finalized first-round tier group can be demoted, and only once the tie-break order is final.

T3/Open never moves lower; a bottom-four finish there is recorded as probation instead. If a published result is corrected afterwards, the demotion is recalculated atomically in the same transaction as the correction.

Rankings are calculated from approved, published results only. Kills, placement, and WWCD points are configurable per tournament, and one configuration drives the ladder, the form shown on a profile, and the standings on the event itself.

Ranking weights stay collapsed behind a disclosure on the public ladder. There is no second mutable ranking source anywhere, so nothing has to be reconciled between two screens.

Advancement is transactional and repeatable. A round is planned so that every group advances the same number of teams, with four to eight qualifiers per group, balanced group sizes, and invited teams counted before the groups are built.

A round can only advance when every source match is published, completed, and approved, with no unresolved revision challenge. If a source result changes later, qualification review can repair an eligible round using a current preview, a written reason, and an audit record.

A Grand Final runs for one to three days with four to six matches per day, one selected start time across the days, calculated intervals, and at most eighteen matches.

The competitive field is sixteen teams plus one separate Admin Team. Two invited teams need fourteen qualifiers and four invited teams need twelve. Check-in and opt-out are Grand Final only, and a team that drops out is replaced from the eligible pool.

A lineup is snapshotted at registration and frozen once the roster lock passes. An exceptional change after the lock needs an authorised, reasoned decision that is recorded against the tournament.

A trial member occupies a slot but does not receive full management or private team-chat access until the trial is confirmed. Expiry of a trial is deferred while an approved lineup still names that player, so a team is never left short by a timer.

Reliability is objective. It is built from verified participation, completed tournaments, check-ins and opt-outs, withdrawals, unexcused no-shows, approved penalties, and attributable resolved disputes.

Filing a dispute is never a penalty in itself. Repeat no-shows run through a configurable threshold with review, evidence, and appeal data, and each decision is audited.

A season is a window, not a reset button. Activating a season changes which totals the public profiles and the ladder display, while career totals are preserved and never overwritten.

Closing a season snapshots the totals it freezes, and duplicate-close protection stops the same season being closed twice. Season awards are recalculated on demand from verified results and keep a recorded computation state.

Achievements are permanent historical rows rather than a replaceable flag. A tournament achievement, a Global Toppers podium place, a season award, and an organizer award are each recorded, and a grant or revocation keeps its own audit reason.

When a completed result is corrected, the achievement change, its audit entry, and the inbox notice commit together. A durable retry queue reconciles any achievement work that fails on the first attempt.

Creator is an additive capability unlocked by referral rather than purchased. It never removes the ordinary player or team permissions an account already holds.

One successful unique registration with one immutable attribution counts as a referral; clicks do not count. Progress runs against a target of three hundred valid unique registrations, and the capability activates atomically at exactly that point.

Creator Fast Track is an exception workflow. An applicant applies without paying, an administrator reviews the request and sets both the amount and the active payment account, the applicant then submits private image or PDF proof with a transaction reference, and the capability activates once that proof is verified.

Team-tier Fast Track is separate and never changes a team actual tier. Administrators publish immutable package prices, and a verified team owner buys a package and later spends one approved, unexpired credit when applying to a higher-tier event. Rejection, withdrawal, or deletion before the event starts restores the credit once, with its original expiry.

Only an administrator announces a Global Toppers opportunity: sixty-four slots for global ranks one to one hundred and twenty-eight, or one hundred and twenty-eight slots for ranks one to one hundred and ninety-two. Eligible organizers are notified, and acceptance is transaction-safe so only the first valid acceptance is assigned the event.

Team entry is always free. The qualifying rank is read from authoritative backend data and checked both when a team applies and when a slot is allocated, and the allocated rank is immutable even if the team later drops on the ladder.

A paid tournament charges a platform fee of five percent of the total prize pool, calculated by the backend, and that fee is separate from team entry payments. Up to three active payment-account snapshots are published, and a team submits private proof with a transaction reference for an authorized reviewer to approve, correct, or reject.

Prize distribution is an audited state machine: Announced, Verified, Tournament Completed, Processing, and Distributed. Processing needs a transaction reference and private proof, the winner is resolved from verified achievements, and an authorized manager of the winning team confirms receipt. A problem moves the payment to Receipt Disputed for administrator resolution.

A dispute can only be raised by a participant in the event, with evidence that participant owns, and it is handled by the Tournament Director or an administrator. A match-scoped dispute can be attributed to a team when that is relevant to the outcome.

Result revision runs Original, Challenged, Corrected, Finalized. A correction requires a written reason, keeps an append-only snapshot, and re-derives form and rankings live, while the public results page carries a sanitised correction history. Evidence deadlines and overrides travel through the same audited path.

Private material stays private and backend-authorised. Team chat, recruitment conversations, payment proof, room credentials, watchlists, and calendar entries are visible only to the accounts entitled to them.

Uploads are validated by their actual content, size, and decoded dimensions, stored under random names, and supported images are re-encoded to WebP. Critical rules are enforced on the server, so hiding a control on screen never becomes a way past a permission.