SEASON 3 — MAXIMUM PUNISHMENT

A season is one month. When it ends, the standings are recorded, a new season begins, and every rating is pulled part of the way back toward the 1,000 that everybody started from. It is a soft reset: nobody is wiped, and nobody keeps a position they earned in March for the rest of the year.

The reason is that a permanent, never-resetting board stops being a competition after a few months. The people at the top got there and stopped needing to defend it; the people arriving look at a gap they cannot close and correctly conclude there is no point trying. Both ends of the board go quiet for the same reason.

Pulling everyone partway back each month fixes both. A strong player re-establishes their rating quickly — that is what being strong means — but they do have to play to do it. A new player joins a board where the distances are survivable.

A full reset to 1,000 would be simpler to explain and considerably worse. It throws away real information: someone who has demonstrated over hundreds of battles that they belong at 2,400 is not a coin flip against a beginner on the first of the month, and pretending otherwise produces a fortnight of badly matched, pointless battles for both of them.

A partial pull keeps most of what was learned about a player while still compressing the board. Ratings converge again within a handful of battles, which is fast enough that the first week of a season is competitive rather than chaotic.

Your final position and rating for every season you played are stored permanently and shown on your profile. Your peak rating is kept too, and it is never reduced by a reset — the highest you have ever been stays the highest you have ever been.

So the reset moves the number you are currently fighting with. It does not touch the record of what you did, which is the part worth keeping.

The board above ranks by rating, which will always favour people who have been at this a while. The climbers list ranks by how far someone has moved since the season began, and the streak list by consecutive wins — both of which a two-week-old account can top outright.

That is deliberate. A single ranking produces a single group of people who feel the game is for them. Three of them, measuring different things, produce three.