How the league works

Format

9 teams of 30. Each Friday three group matches run at the same time on three servers, three teams per server, one team per faction: RED GREEN BLUE. The winner of each group goes to the Saturday final on one server; the runners-up play the plate and the third-placed teams the shield on the other two servers at the same time, so every team plays both nights. Over 4 weeks every team meets every other team exactly once in the groups (nine teams split as the affine plane of order three: twelve lines of three in four parallel classes). Sides are assigned so each team cycles through all three factions.

Game night

Every time on this site is US Eastern. Doors open 60 minutes before kickoff, kickoff is 19:00 Eastern on Friday and 18:00 Eastern on Saturday, and doors close 6 hours after kickoff. Nothing runs outside the window: a match still live at doors close is ended on the score as it stands. Turn up, or your slot goes to drop-ins.

The game mode

WARDOGS King of the Hill. Three factions fight over a Control Zone inside the wider battlefield. Whichever faction has the most players inside the zone earns one point every 30 seconds. Nothing else scores: not kills, not vehicles, not cash. The Hot Zone is the smaller area inside the Control Zone where a player counts double towards control and rewards are doubled; capturing the map's towers gives one digit each of a four-digit code, and a full code entered at your own tower pulls the Hot Zone towards it. The first faction to 100 points wins, and there is exactly one winner: there is no clock and no draw. The other two are placed by score, then kills, then fewer deaths. Matches regularly run past an hour, which is why the league's safety limit is 2 minutes; it exists for a broken server, not for the game.

Sign-up

Sign in through Steam. A captain creates the team and gets an invite link. Players sign in through Steam and open the link. The roster locks automatically at 30; the captain can lock early at 30. One team per player per season. The SteamID you sign in with is the one the referee checks in game, so use the account you play on.

Free agents and drop-ins

No team? Join the pool. The pool forms its own teams, Metal Gear Online style: the moment it holds 30 agents a pool team is drafted and locked with nobody pressing anything, and again at every further 30. Agents are sorted by rating and dealt serpentine (1 to N, then N to 1) into teams of 30, then a swap pass trades players between the strongest and weakest pool team while it narrows the gap. On match night, a pool agent who joins a lobby is a drop-in: the referee assigns them to the side with the fewest players present (never over 30), locks them there, and their stats count for that team for that match.

Match day

60 minutes before kickoff the referee tosses the map, sets a join password (shown on the match page to rostered players and free agents only), reserves a slot for every rostered player and opens the lobby. Anyone not on a roster or in the pool is removed. Every rostered player is pushed to their team's side and kept there for the whole match. Switching sides is reversed automatically and logged. At kickoff the match restarts at 0-0-0 with everyone in place.

Result

The faction that reaches 100 is the winner; second and third are separated by score, then kills, then fewer deaths. The match ends the instant the cap is hit (the referee reads the score every two seconds), or, only if something is broken, at the safety limit or on a referee decision. Group points 3 / 1 / 0, final 5 / 2 / 0, plate 3 / 1 / 0, shield 2 / 1 / 0. Table tiebreak: finals won, wins, total score, kills.

Ratings

Team rating is Elo, three ways. A match is three pairwise contests decided by placing. For each pair the expected result is E = 1 / (1 + 10^((Rb - Ra) / 400)); the actual result is 1 for the better placing, 0.5 for a dead heat, 0 otherwise. The change is K x margin x (S - E) summed over both opponents, with K = 32 for a group match and 48 for a final, and margin = 1 + min(score gap, 100) / 200. Everyone starts at 1500 and the three changes in a match sum to zero.

Player rating comes from match impact: I = (10 K - 6 D + 3 HS) / T + P with K kills, D deaths, HS headshots, T = minutes present / 10 (floor 1) and P = 5 / 2 / 0 for the team's placing. Rating = 1000 + 40 x mean(I) x sqrt(min(n, 10) / 10) over n rated matches, so one big night cannot outrank a body of work.

Stats

Every kill from the server feed is logged with weapon, distance and context, and only counts between kickoff and the end. The leaderboard and player pages read from that log, nothing else.

The toss

Each fixture publishes a sha256 commitment when it is drawn. At toss time the seed is revealed and the map index is the first eight hex characters of the seed as a number, mod the pool size. Anyone can verify it.