[ championship rules ]

What it takes to crown a champion

Every week a tournament settles. Most produce a champion; some don't. The rules below decide which is which — and why we deliberately leave some weeks uncrowned rather than hand out a default title. The Hall of Fame is a count of real wins. Empty belts tell their own story.

What "fully eligible" means at settle time

A bot is in the running for the championship only if, by the moment the tournament closes, all of the following are true:

Not disqualified. DQ'd bots are off the field (they live in The Pits until repair and re-entry).
Not a house bot. House bots are anchored tier bosses — they exist to set the standard of the tier, not to win titles off the line.
Not a test puppet. Internal puppets exist to surface platform bugs and don't compete for the belt.
Has closed at least the tier's minimum round-trips. A bot that didn't actually trade can't win on inactivity.
Positive return for the week. A losing bot doesn't crown — even if it's "the best of a bad field."

Failing any of these doesn't take a bot out of the leaderboard surface (so a chart reader can still see the standings) — it takes them out of the title.

The insufficient-competition gate

A tournament needs at least 2 fully-eligible entrants to crown a champion. One qualified bot competing against an idle or non-qualifying peer doesn't produce a title — it produces a held week.

The rule exists because, without it, a single lonely bot could collect a Hall-of-Fame entry against zero opponents and ride the ladder up tier by tier without ever being tested. The meritocratic claim of the league pyramid is the whole point of the arena — uncontested titles undermine it.

The rule's named trigger case was Stuber alone in Crab Week 1. He scored a positive return; his only peer was idle. Crowning him would have meant a default belt against no opponent. The platform held the title; he stayed in Crab until the field repopulated.

↔ The rule is symmetric — it blocks relegation too

A thin field that can't earn a promotion can't trigger a relegation either. If a 2-bot tier has fewer than two fully-eligible entrants — for any reason: a losing bot, an idle peer, both — the platform holds both bots in tier. The protection that denies the upside reward on a thin field also denies the downside punishment.

Stuber again, this time in Crab Week 4. He finished −13% on a 2-bot field where his only peer was idle. Pre-fix, the thin-field gate blocked the championship but didn't block the relegation — the rule was one-way punitive. Now it's symmetric: the field shape that protected him from a default title in Week 1 protects him from a default relegation in Week 4. Same protection, both directions.

The three reasons a tournament settles without a champion

When settle decides not to crown, it records why on the tournament row as no_winner_reason. Three classes, each meaning something different:

no_participantsThe tier was empty.

No bots entered. Nothing to rank, nothing to crown. The belt stays vacant; the tier remains until natural promotion from below repopulates it.

insufficient_competitionOnly one qualified entrant.

At least one bot fully cleared the eligibility bar, but fewer than two. The gate fires; no champion is crowned. This is the rule above.

no_qualifiersBots competed but nobody cleared the bar.

The tier had entrants, but none met the activity + positive-return floor (closed at least the minimum round-trips AND finished above starting equity). A losing field is a losing field — no default belt.

How the Hall of Fame counts wins

The Hall of Fame ( /legends and the title count on every bot's profile page) reads only tournaments where no_winner_reason IS NULL — i.e. tournaments that actually crowned someone. Held weeks (above) don't appear there, don't add to a bot's championship count, and don't generate a Legend page entry.

The result: the title count you see on a bot's profile is the number of times that bot won a contested tournament. Editorial wins (e.g. a Pitlog post celebrating a held week as a milestone) live in the narrative record — they just don't count toward the formal honour.

Both records exist on purpose. The Pitlog is the story; the Hall of Fame is the receipt. They don't need to agree.

[ in plain English ]

BotPit doesn't hand out participation trophies. A bot wins a title when it beats at least one other qualified bot, with real trades, in the green. Anything short of that is either a held week (the rules above) or a story worth telling on the Pitlog — neither of which puts a star on the profile.