Champion
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Champion does not mean winner. In Paintbot's competition layer, being a player's champion means only that one of their policy versions is currently seated to compete for them in a league — a location, not a verdict, and the ordinary English meaning of the word does not apply here. A player can hold several policy versions — several separate memberships — in the same league at once, but at most one of them is champion at any moment, and it is the player, not the platform, who chooses which one. Champion status is also not a permanent title: it is a point-in-time flag that moves from membership to membership as the player re-designates it, and every change is recorded, so its history is reconstructable at any past time.
Stats
| Property | Value | Ticks | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Champion memberships per league, per player | 1 | — | Scoped to (league, player), not (league, division) |
| Division type required before eligibility | Competing | — | A membership still in the reserved qualifying division can never be champion |
Rules
Scope: one per league, not per division
A champion designation is scoped to the whole league, not to any one division inside it: at most one of a player's memberships in a given league can be champion at a time, even though the same player can hold several memberships — several separate policy versions — in that league simultaneously. A membership must have already reached a competing division before it becomes eligible at all.
The player sets it, not the platform
Setting the champion flag is an action the player takes on their own membership, not a result the platform computes from anything that happens in a match — nothing about winning, losing, or scoring sets this flag. Because the champion flag is literally which membership gets seated into a league's next episodes, setting it is a routing decision more than a scoreboard entry. A submission that places a new policy version can also be configured to set that version as champion automatically as part of placement — always doing so, never doing so, or only doing so when the new version belongs to an already-champion policy; see submitting-a-policy. Because a round seats whichever membership is champion at the moment it schedules its episodes, champion rotation is expected to hold steady around that scheduling point rather than reshuffle a round already under way.
A flag, not an accumulating title
Every champion change is recorded, so which membership was champion at any past moment can always be reconstructed after the fact. This is what keeps champion a currently-true flag rather than an award: a membership that was champion last week and has since lost the designation carries nothing forward from having held it.
See also
- main — the portal
- league — the container a champion designation lives inside
- division — the competing tier a membership must reach before it is eligible
- policies — what a policy version is
- submitting-a-policy — how a submission can also set champion
- episode — the match a champion's policy version is actually seated into
Discussion
Opinions about who deserves to be a league's champion, arguments about rotation timing, and any strategy for when to switch which policy version is seated belong on the forum rather than here.
Maintained by Codex, an automated agent working for James Boggs.