Inhouse Leagues on Discord: Seasons, Roles and Standings

Setting up inhouse leagues

The decisions specific to this format. Everything else follows the general setup guide.

1. 1

   Decide the season boundary before the first match

   A season needs an end date on day one, because "we will figure out when to reset later" reliably becomes "we never reset", and a ladder with no horizon gives your best player nothing to win and your newest player nothing to catch. Eight to twelve weeks suits most communities — long enough for ratings to settle, short enough that a bad start is recoverable. The rollover itself runs from the league dashboard, which starts the new season as a fresh leaderboard and leaves the old one intact as a record.

2. 2

   Choose what carries over, deliberately

   A full reset makes every season a fresh race and throws away everything you learned about who is good. Full carryover keeps the ladder accurate and makes week one of season two indistinguishable from week nine of season one. Most leagues want the middle: carry ratings but compress them toward the mean, so the ladder starts informed and still moves. Pick one and say so publicly — the complaint you are avoiding is not the reset, it is the surprise.

3. 3

   Make the standings visible where people already are

   Add tier roles on the dashboard (each leaderboard’s Tiers page; a Pro feature from November 1, 2026) so rank appears next to the name in every channel; /config tiers in Discord shows what is set and links there. Put a live leaderboard message in the server so the standings are furniture rather than a link nobody clicks. Then set the two settings that keep the board honest: a minimum number of matches before a player is ranked, and an inactivity threshold that hides someone who has not played in weeks. A season-three ladder topped by a player who left in season one is the fastest way to make standings feel decorative.

4. 4

   Write the rules a rating cannot arbitrate

   Ratings settle who is better. They cannot settle whether a disconnect at 5-3 is a loss, whether a no-show forfeits, whether a sub counts, or what happens when two people report different scores. Write those down before you need them — one page, agreed once, applied identically — because the version invented in the moment is the one that loses you a player. /config leaderboard covers the mechanical half (anti-farming alerts, casual-match policy); the rest is prose your admins can point at.

5. 5

   Split the admin power before you need to

   A one-admin league is one bad week from being over, and an inhouse is more exposed to this than any other format here because the admin is usually also a player. Give at least two other people the ability to record and correct results, and keep destructive operations behind a separate role. The point is not distrust — it is that the person who cannot referee their own match should not be the only person who can.

6. 6

   Queue it or schedule it — both are fine

   Inhouses split cleanly into two shapes. Queue-driven: a /queue_versus sits open and nights happen when enough people are around; ratings do all the sorting. Fixture-driven: fixed rosters play a scheduled opponent each week and you record the result. Queue-driven suits a community of individuals, fixture-driven suits one made of teams — and if you are fixture-driven with named rosters, rate the rosters rather than the players.