Sid's Competitive Rounds

A ranked competitive mod for vanilla ROUNDS v1.1.2 ONLY by Landfall. Built for the Competitive Rounds Discord community (~2,500 members).

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Designed exclusively for vanilla ROUNDS v1.1.2 (the "Default Public Version" on Steam). NOT compatible with older versions, beta branches, or any other mods. The mod will automatically disable itself if it detects an incompatible game version or another BepInEx plugin.

Features

• Glicko-2 ranked series — skill-based matchmaking with RD-aware odds, BO3 series, Elo + rating history tracked server-side.
• NEW: Free-For-All (3-10 players), ranked — everyone for themselves: last player standing takes the half point, first to 5 points wins. Simultaneous card picks (no 10-player pick queue), a live per-player scoreboard with the leader crowned, a rolling 5-card deck cap, and maps that scale up with lobby size. Leavers don't end the match — survivors play on. Its own FFA rating, leaderboard, and recent-games panel.
• 2v2 ranked — its own Glicko ladder and leaderboard: queue solo into rating-balanced random teams, or open a custom lobby and pick teams with 3 friends. Per-player gold/XP payouts and a crown for both members of the leading team.
• 1v2 (unranked beta) — one solo versus a duo, with separate Solo and Duo activity boards and an optional extra starting pick for the solo.
• 25 rank tiers — Beginner I through Grand Master V, mirrored as Discord roles that update automatically as your rating moves.
• Tournaments — a weekly same-time bracket that auto-connects your matches when both players are ready, plus long-running async tournaments with a week per round. Sign-ups, reminders, and results run through Discord.
• Community character cosmetics — artist-made faces and accessories (including animated ones) that equip in ROUNDS' own character editor and render for everyone: in matches, card picks, and menus. Community artists control their own creations — price, limited stock, gifting, even blocking buyers — and submit new art for review entirely in-game (512×512 transparent PNG, drop it in a folder and hit Upload).
• Hold Tab: live match scoreboard — every player's current build at a glance mid-game: damage, attack/reload speed, ammo, bullet stats, block cooldown, lifesteal, movement, and full card lists.
• Matchmaking queues — Elo-tiered search with mutual ready-up in 1v1/2v2, consent-based instant queues in 1v2/FFA, a 30-minute search cap everywhere, and an optional ranked-only toggle.
• In-game leaderboard — sortable, with player detail panel, rating history line graph, head-to-head series history, and achievements — plus a Compare view that charts up to 12 players side by side (ratings, accuracy, playtime, achievement grid, and more).
• Match history + card stats — BO3 series grouping, opponent cards, pass rates, per-game Hit% / Block% / keys-per-second for both players, game length, and a scoring-timeline graph on hover.
• Tier List Maker — assign every card an S/A/B/C/D/E/F tier with click-to-cycle. Three independent lists (Casual / Ranked / All) persisted server-side. Click any card to preview the full-color art. Export the whole list as a near-square PNG with real ROUNDS card art + your live ## played / ##% won underneath each card. PNG lands in <ROUNDS>/CompetitiveRoundsTierLists/.
• Gold economy + shop — earn gold from matches and achievements; spend it on titles, Photon-synced trails, map color skins (premium animated ones included), body colors, cursor colors, player aura effects, and stackable name styling (bold/italic/color/size/font-style/glow).
• Betting — wager gold on live ranked series with Glicko-expectancy odds, in-game or from Discord, with custom stake amounts. Locks once game 1 is underway; abandoned series auto-refund.
• In-game ↔ Discord chat bridge — press T anywhere in-game to chat, messages round-trip through the Competitive Rounds Discord with ratings and titles attached.
• 41 achievements (100-1000g by difficulty, several unlock exclusive titles) — from card-build challenges (5-0 with Barrage, two Glass Cannons...) to marathon streaks (100+ casual wins in a row), with retroactive grants from your existing match history.
• Anti-cheat — sub-60s match-pattern auto-flagging, too-many-cards detection, HMAC-signed match reports, macro detection, and an admin tab for ban / flag review / series reversal.
• Auto-update notifications — the Thunderstore build shows an in-game prompt when a new version is available (use r2modman or the Thunderstore Mod Manager to apply the update).
• Maintenance-mode awareness — server restarts surface as a graceful banner, not a disconnect.
• Privacy-first — first-launch consent prompt, revoke any time, full Delete-my-data path in Settings.

Compatibility

• Required: ROUNDS v1.1.2 (Steam "Default Public Version")
• Required: BepInExPack ROUNDS 5.4.1901 (declared as a Thunderstore dependency — auto-installed; this is the only BepInEx pack distributed for ROUNDS)
• NOT compatible with any other BepInEx mods. The mod must be the only plugin installed.
• NOT compatible with older ROUNDS versions or Steam beta branches.

Installation

There are two supported ways to install. Pick one — don't combine them on the same ROUNDS install.

Thunderstore (this page — recommended if you already use r2modman)

1. Open r2modman or the Thunderstore Mod Manager and choose the ROUNDS profile.
2. Find Sid's Competitive Rounds in the Online tab and click Download — BepInEx is pulled in automatically as a dependency.
3. Click Start modded to launch ROUNDS through the mod manager. That's it.
4. When a new version is released, the in-game banner flags it — apply it from r2modman's Update tab.

Auto-installer (Windows .exe from Discord)

1. Join the Competitive Rounds Discord and grab CompetitiveRoundsInstaller.exe from the pinned install link.
2. Run it — the installer auto-detects your ROUNDS install, installs BepInEx if needed, and drops the mod into ROUNDS\BepInEx\plugins\CompetitiveRounds\.
3. Launch ROUNDS. New mod versions are auto-downloaded and applied on next launch — no r2modman required for updates on this path.

Both paths produce the same gameplay; the only functional difference is that the direct-Discord build self-applies mod updates while the Thunderstore build defers to the mod manager (Thunderstore's distribution rules don't allow the self-updater's helper script).

Getting started

1. Launch ROUNDS — the mod loads automatically.
2. Accept the first-launch data-consent prompt (or Decline to play fully offline).
3. Click SID'S COMPETITIVE ROUNDS on the main menu.
4. Enable Ranked to start tracking your matches.
5. Use Search Ranked to find an opponent at your Elo.
6. Open the Discord for community, matchmaking, and chat: https://discord.gg/4tsWadH6tc

Controls

• F5 — Toggle the competitive overlay
• T — Open the chat input (works both in-menu and in-game)
• ESC — Close the competitive overlay

Links

• Discord: https://discord.gg/4tsWadH6tc
• GitHub: https://github.com/SidNDeed/SidsCompetitiveRounds

v1.38.7 — 2026-08-15

Schema changes: migrations 221 (pcolor_poison body color; applied), 222 (ranked_queue.home_region; applied), 223 (76 machine-translation seeds for the new shop/vocab keys; applied).

Added

• New body color: Poison. The exact green the Poison card flashes on its victims — taken from the game's own card data rather than matched by eye — for anyone building a poison-themed look. None of the existing greens was close: Forest shares the hue but renders at half the brightness, Emerald leans jade, Neon Lime leans yellow. 3000g, under Body Colors in the shop.

• Tournament matches announce themselves everywhere. The in-game HUD now shows a gold TOURNAMENT banner (with your exact bracket position, e.g. "Async Tournament - Winners R2") above the RANKED line; the Discord series results, the live-bets board, the gambler ping, bet confirmations and the settled-bets posts all carry a trophy tag naming the bracket match.

• Post-match tournament DMs (the missing notifications). After every bracket match the bot now DMs both players: winners are told who they face next (with the async deadline when one applies) or which match they're waiting on; a first loss leads with "You're not out!" and names your next opponent — or the match that decides them; elimination congratulates the run, with your placement when the bracket records one; champions get their own DM. A separate DM lands the moment your next match actually goes live, and it's delivered reliably — retried until it reaches you. Forfeit advances are phrased honestly instead of "you won".

• Tournament matches are always spectatable. The spectator opt-out is bypassed for the two players of a live bracket match — tournament games are public by rule. Every other spectate safety rule still applies.

Fixed

• Tournament bets popup is clickable again (bug 230). The popup's own buttons were being swallowed by its click shield, and a coordinate bug made any click read as "outside the popup" and dismiss it.

• Better diagnostics for post-match disconnects (bugs 227/228). The connection-restart tracers now run in every room type, so the next code-room disconnect names its exact trigger in the log. The investigation found the mechanism — the base game restarts a player's connection 10 seconds after they answer the rematch prompt if their opponent hasn't answered yet — but a safe fix needs both clients acting together, and every one-sided approach made things worse in review; it's deferred to a dedicated pass rather than shipped half-safe.

• Poison hits register reliably (bug 225). A bullet's poison component could miss registration on the victim's client due to a game init-ordering race — the hit then knocked you back but the poison (all of a poison bullet's real damage) never started on any screen. The missing component is now re-registered at hit time, with a safety net against double-application.

• Faces show in 1v2 and 2v2 rooms (bug 224). The last player to join a team room missed everyone else's face for the whole sitting (a base-game quirk FFA already worked around); the fix now covers team rooms too.

• Discord language channels stop reposting ancient messages (bug 226). The relay now tracks exactly what it has delivered — durably, across restarts — instead of relying on a memory that old test messages could fall out of. The stale test messages themselves are cleaned up too.

• Live-bets boards stop fighting Discord's rate limit. The three boards edited into one channel every 10 seconds and were permanently throttled; they now stagger and skip edits when nothing changed, while still recovering if a board message is deleted.

• Round-end poison watchdog accuracy. Streams orphaned by a round boundary after they started no longer produce false "possible modified client" log entries; genuine mid-fight silence still gets flagged.

• Phoenix no longer floods the log with ~2,000 harmless warnings per game while charging its revive.

• Community cosmetic translations actually show (reported by Kyltist, our Russian translator). Approved translations for community-made cosmetic names and descriptions now render in the shop, on Home, and in the preview — an early design decision had the game deliberately skip them while the translation portal kept accepting the work, so approved entries (24 in Russian alone) existed but never displayed.

• Nametag size previews show again. The Bigger / XL / Huge / Float rows rendered nothing after "Preview:" in every language — the preview's own size tag was taller than the row and got clipped whole. Those rows now grow to show the name at its true size, which is the point of the preview.

• Rarity and item-kind words translate. "(rare)", "(common)", "(face)", "(nametag)" and friends were never translatable at all. In Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian and Swedish the rarity reads as a labeled phrase ("редкость: эпическая") so the grammar works next to any item type.

• Fairer ranked-queue regions. The room region used to be whichever player's momentary connection region happened to win the coin toss — which is how two same-region players could both end up on a 200-ping US server. Now, when both players' Photon home region (its own ping cache) agrees, that region is used, and any region signal beats the old "us" default. Also fixed a pre-existing race where the two clients could be told different regions for the same match and end up in separate rooms.

Changed

• Card popup images no longer need downloading. Card art in stats popups, the hold-Tab board and the tier-list export now renders natively from the game itself (correct in every language, always up to date) — the old image pack download (which had been failing quietly) is gone, and the mod's Thunderstore package shrinks by ~15 MB. The tier-list export shows a progress note the first time while it renders each card.

v1.38.5 — 2026-08-13

New

• Your end-of-game build is now recorded and shown in match history. Hover a game's card names and you get the full card list and the build those cards produced — damage, attack speed, reload, ammo, blocks, move speed, HP and the rest. Works in 1v1, 2v2, 1v2 and FFA. Older games have no build recorded and simply show their cards as before.
• The rating box now covers every mode. My Stats and the leaderboard detail show your 2v2 and FFA rating, RD, peak and board position alongside 1v1, with your rank role shown next to your 1v1 peak in its own colour. 1v2 has no elo, so it shows its win/loss record with the other records instead of pretending.
• 2v2 and FFA podium titles. Top three on either board get a placement title of their own, and both boards now paint the top three gold/silver/bronze the way the 1v1 board always has.
• Chat controls. Press M in game to cycle chat between normal, pinned (stays on screen) and muted — and when you mute, other players can see that in the chat panel, so nobody wastes a message on you. Settings gains a "chat fade after" knob from 0 (never show chat during play) up to 90 seconds.
• FFA card toasts show the whole round. Every player's pick, and every card that rolled off the 5-card cap, laid out in a single strip across the bottom instead of one name at a time over the play area.
• Animated cosmetics can be uploaded as GIFs. Artists can submit a GIF directly (2-16 frames, 0.5-15 fps) instead of exporting numbered PNGs.

Fixed

• FFA opening cards going missing (bug 214). In a 6-player game four players lost their first card. A spectator seat had been leaking a counter into the pick protocol; the room then split into two numbering schemes and every pick made under the "wrong" one was silently discarded. Both the cause and the amplifier are fixed, and a drift now names exactly who lost a card in the log.
• Betting staying open long after a match was decided (bug 212). The lock for private-room series was set to a threshold the metric could never reach, so it had never once fired since it shipped. Bets now close at 2 points as intended, and the same rule is enforced in game and in Discord.
• God Build (and every other achievement) in room-code and quickplay games (bug 209). Achievements were only evaluated in rooms the mod itself created, which is a minority of real play — a genuinely earned achievement in a private or public lobby simply never fired.
• Server-side achievements now tell you when you earn them (bug 201). Silent Drill, Clutch, Lumberjack, the sweeps, the slayers and the rank thresholds are granted by the server, and the client had no path to announce any of them.
• Muffled audio while spectating (bug 210). A failed sound event was never retired, so its voices leaked until the pool ran dry and started stealing voices from healthy sounds — quiet layers first, which is what made it sound muffled rather than silent.
• Discord FFA results show half points (bug 215), matching the in-game score.
• Rage Quit % now measures what it was always meant to: how often your quickplay opponents quit on you, not how often you quit.
• Spectating: the connect screen explains itself instead of looking like a blank cover, cards are cleared between games so nobody appears to start with extra ones, and titles render bracketed in their real colours.
• Async tournaments work the way they were designed. No room code, no region, no ready-up — you and your opponent play a private lobby whenever suits you before the deadline and it counts automatically. The lock DM no longer tells async players to be online at a start time. Sync tournaments are unchanged and now pick a Photon region per match that suits both players, instead of one region for the whole bracket.
• Layout: the FFA start-button countdown no longer clips (in any language), the 1v2/2v2/FFA tabs share one scale, the chat input no longer covers the messages above it, and tournament bets live behind a button instead of filling the tab.

Security

• Uploaded cosmetic images are now fully validated and re-encoded server-side, so nothing can ride along inside an image file.

v1.38.6 — 2026-08-14

Fixed

• The mid-fight hitch in busy games (bug 217). When a bullet's hit notification arrived for something this client had already cleaned up, the error it threw took the rest of that network packet batch down with it — every other player's position update queued behind it arrived late. That is the "bullets and player positions lag while ping looks fine" feel. The error is now contained (17 hits in the two reported FFA games; the previous night's session had 87), and a companion guard quiets the bullet-pool teardown error that rode the same stacks.
• Spectator join is far cleaner (bug 216). Replayed leftovers from the room's past can no longer collide with anything during the join (they are made physics-inert the moment they appear), and the thousands of harmless "no such PhotonView" warnings a spectator seat used to burn CPU and log space on are silenced and counted instead.
• Poison now shows on the spectator seat. A stale local dead/respawning flag on one replica could eat every accepted poison verdict for that player — their health bar never moved for the whole observation. The observer no longer vetoes the victim's own authority using local lifecycle bits.
• FFA scoreboard log lines carry names again instead of nametag markup, and the stale-projectile sweep's diagnostic no longer goes quiet after the first game.
• "I poisoned him and nothing happened" at round ends (bug 221). A poison hit landing in the round-transition window starts a stream no client will ever honor (the revive already cancelled it — vanilla behaviour), but the watchdog treated that silence as a possible cheat and logged accusations against innocent players. Boundary-window streams are now recognized for what they are; genuine mid-fight silence still gets flagged.
• Map skins did their full recolor work twice at every round transition. Two code paths each scheduled the same deferred tint pass, so every client with a map skin walked all renderers and particles twice back-to-back at exactly the moment rounds change — measured in two players' logs at 2x per transition. Now it runs once.

New

• Network health line in the log. Every 10 seconds in an online room the log records ping, effective fps, actor count and dispatch-guard counters — so the next "it felt laggy" report can be diagnosed from the bundle instead of guessed at.

v1.38.4 (2026-08-11) — Translator titles and portal progress

Schema: migration 214.

• Three new achievement titles for translators — Rosetta (10 strings), Dragoman (100) and Babel (1000), paying 100g / 300g / 1000g. A string counts once it is APPROVED, and both people behind it earn it: the translator who proposed it and the moderator who reviewed it. Doing both yourself on the same string still counts once, and moderators still cannot approve their own work. Existing contributors were back-granted.
• Progress bars in the translation portal, one per language. The green fill is approved and live; the lighter bar behind it is everything with a draft awaiting review; the dark remainder is what has no usable translation at all — so rejecting a bad machine draft correctly pushes the bar back and shows the work that is genuinely left. Ukrainian and Swedish count the base-game strings too, since the game does not ship those languages; Spanish and Russian do not, because it does.
• The Compare tab's achievement grid now sizes its columns to the space available — at 50 achievements the old fixed two columns ran off the bottom of the panel on common resolutions.
• Granting an achievement from the admin panel now also grants its title. This was missed for Sid Slayer and Stan Slayer too, and re-granting repairs an old one.

v1.38.3 (2026-08-11) — Ukrainian + Swedish

Two new full mod languages, plus first-of-its-kind base-game localization.

• Ukrainian (Українська) and Swedish (Svenska) join English, Spanish and Russian as complete mod languages: every UI string (1,708 keys per language), machine-drafted, independently reviewed, seeded into the translation portal for community moderation, and selectable from the first-launch prompt or Settings.
• The base game itself speaks Ukrainian and Swedish now. ROUNDS ships 9 official languages — Ukrainian and Swedish are not among them (the vanilla files even contain an unused "Svenska" label, so this one is overdue). With the mod language set to uk/sv, all 242 vanilla strings — menus, prompts, card names and descriptions — render translated via a runtime-injected locale. Fully reversible, zero effect on any other language setting, and card text in the mod's own panels follows automatically.
• Release notes in four languages: every release's notes are now published in es/ru/uk/sv (machine-translated, labeled as such), and the current three releases were back-filled.
• Translation portal upgrades that came out of the review rounds: base-game strings are moderatable with their table/entry context shown (including Landfall's own translator notes), stale proposals against reworded English are refused at approval, and the shop-string snapshot now has a proper refresh tool.
• Ukrainian and Swedish chat channels join the in-game chat split: pick them in the chat view/typing pickers, and messages bridge to the matching Discord rooms (English/Spanish/Russian unchanged).
• Spanish/Russian catch-up: 13 recently-added strings (lobby betting, new shop cosmetics) translated, plus consistency fixes from the review pass.

Known limits, accepted for this release: a language chat channel that has been quiet for a while can look empty when you switch to it (the in-game log keeps one shared 60-message buffer; the server still has the history), and changing ROUNDS' own language from the vanilla Options screen during the few seconds the mod is setting up uk/sv will not stick.

v1.38.2 (2026-08-11)

Mini-release: the Aug 11 playtest minor-bug batch (spectator polish + portal fix). Also raises the server's minimum mod version to 1.38.1, which restores 2v2/FFA bettability for everyone.

• Stuck pick cards are gone for spectators (bug 197). A fast join could collapse the cleanup window to zero, leaving the room's cache-replayed card table standing for the whole sitting — the burial now runs synchronously the moment the join replay provably ends. Live leftovers (cards whose local destruction never got scheduled) are swept a few seconds after each round boundary, and the card-picker avatar is hidden at the boundary instead of lingering over the next battle.
• Poison and Decay now move health bars on spectator seats. The spectator's round lifecycle runs slightly behind the fighters', and the damage engine silently ate every DOT verdict that arrived in that gap — then the late revive erased the rest of the stream. Spectator seats now render DOT verdicts directly (display only, clamped above zero — a spectator can never broadcast a death; kills only show via the fighters' own death event), and live streams survive the spectator's late revive.
• Dark team-color stamps (Charcoal, Obsidian, Midnight) get a readability lift wherever they paint text — 2v2 recent-series names, FFA history score counters — while dots and graphs keep the true color.
• Team-identity colors reach the last hardcoded surfaces: the spectator score bar, the hold-Tab match-stats header (fighters had this bug too — a Midnight team read as "blue"), and the 2v2 live-bets rows in the F5 menu (which now also name a stamped side "Team Midnight" instead of "Team 1").
• The 15-FPS deep idle no longer engages mid-spectate — the spectator seat was invisible to both of its "never during online play" gates.
• A sound-engine guard stops one broken voice from aborting every other sound's update each frame (555 errors in one spectator session's log).
• Translation portal: the review queue now shows proposer display names instead of raw Steam IDs (machine drafts still read "by claude-mt").

v1.38.1 (2026-08-10)

New community cosmetic: Twisted Topper (detail slot) joins the shop catalog this release.

Spectator mode — the desync is fixed (bugs 187/188/190/192/194)

• The spectator's game clock is fixed. It was never armed on the spectate join path, and every round-ending kill ratcheted it further down with nothing restoring it — bullets, gun timers, character limb IK, the floating nametag follower and gravity all run on that clock, which is why everything visibly trailed the (real-time) position stream: slow-motion bullets, instant hits, lagging names, floating bodies.
• Removed a vanilla trap where the spectator client silently dropped into TEST-MAP mode on its first map load — which teleport-revived dead fighters at random spawn points on the spectator's screen 2.5 seconds after every death, and contaminated map bookkeeping for the whole session.
• Fixed the ghost-object registry. The join-time cleanup hid the room's inherited object history but left its Photon view registrations alive, so from game 2 of a sitting every new object collided with a ghost view ID and live boxes/bullets stopped updating for spectators (the doubled/desynced string-box reports). Ghosts are now buried AND locally unregistered at source — which also removes the join-time error wall (700+ exceptions in one burst) that correlated with the "lag spike when you joined" reports.
• Map loads are serialized on spectators (vanilla corrupts its own scene-wrapper handoff when two additive loads overlap — routine for a chronically-behind spectator), with boundary reconciles that supersede cleanly instead of stacking, and deck rebuilds that tolerate mid-apply leavers.
• Spectating no longer touches fighter gameplay. A spectator joining or leaving used to arm a 3-second poison "roster quarantine" that disabled block-honoring on live poison streams — spectator churn was changing fighter damage. The poison census now runs on replicated data identically on every seat. Ejecting an unauthorized watcher can also no longer end the fighters' match through the vanilla disconnect cascade.
• Kicks are honest now. Stock Photon ships CloseConnection DISABLED on both ends — every spectator "kick" to date was a silent no-op. Kicks now work cooperatively between mod clients (revoked leases, wrong protocols, unauthorized entrants), fighters remain un-kickable by design, and the server-side lease system stays the real enforcement.
• Spectate protocol floor -> 2 (migration 210): old-protocol clients carry the hazards above, so mixed rooms are excluded. Between the backend deploy and the client release, spectate grants are refused on purpose.

Spectator mode — quality of life (Sid's list + bugs 184/191/193)

• No more black flashes between points. The fullscreen "Synchronizing" cover now exists only before the first sync; after that the live arena stays visible, and vanilla's own between-points score sequence (the orange/blue orbs with HALF/ROUND pips) plays for spectators exactly as fighters see it. Round starts are no longer hidden behind a reconcile.
• The top bar shows the full picture: team-colored names with the game score including half points ("Archnith 2.5 - 3 NotNic"), the current series score, and the SESSION series tally between the two fighters (how many series each has won this sitting — carried in the snapshot protocol).
• Spectators can see who else is spectating (the same bottom-right roster fighters already had — it was explicitly gated off for spectators).
• Escape is deconflicted (bug 191): an open chat box or F5 menu consumes Esc first; the leave-spectating dialog only opens from the base state.
• The F5 menu no longer force-closes when a round starts while spectating (bug 193), and the whole log-driven match tracker is quiescent on spectator clients (watched picks can no longer leak into a later fighter session's telemetry).
• The FFA phantom "card picking ends in Xs" banner fix (bug 184) ships in this release.

Fighter-side (spectator-adjacent)

• Removed every identified spectator-conditional cost on fighter clients: a master-side bookkeeping loop ran at 100x its intended cadence, spectate attest state leaked across rooms, a master handoff could starve spectator validation for a minute, and misc handlers misread spectator joins as "opponent joined". Fighters' own fps/ping telemetry was flat through the playtest; if lag persists at 1-2 spectators after this batch, the remaining suspect is Photon relay fan-out.

Changed

• Spectators can bet. The old rule blocked anyone holding a spectator seat from placing bets (plus a 5-minute cooldown after leaving). Removed: the bet-close windows are the information gate — bets lock once a game is decided (or the FFA time window closes), so watching live can't out-inform a locked bet. Spectators watch from the beginning of a series until disconnect and bet under the same windows as everyone else.

Fixed

• 2v2 betting now actually closes at 1-0 on the server. The live-bets panel has always shown 1-0 series as locked, but the endpoint itself only refused bets at 2 wins — a crafted request could bet on the leader after game 1. The server now enforces the same first-decided-game close as 1v1.

• GROW's damage no longer depends on frame rate in competitive play. The card's growth compounded per rendered frame, making its total multiplier exponential in frame TIME: a 60 FPS shooter dealt ~1.4× the Grow damage of a 400 FPS shooter before stacking, several times more with stacked copies, and a single 200 ms hitch frame multiplied damage ×2.16 by itself — the "low-FPS Grow nukes" reports. In queue-matched ranked 1v1, 2v2, 1v2, FFA and sync-tournament rooms — and in private/quickplay rooms where BOTH players had Ranked enabled when they connected — growth is now normalized to a fixed 240-FPS-equivalent rate — near-identical growth per unit of distance flown for every player (the small remaining frame-granularity differences always err toward LESS growth, never more). Private/quickplay rooms with a ranked-off player, rooms with an unmodded player, and the sandbox keep vanilla behavior (mode rooms — queue, tournament, hosted lobbies — apply it regardless of the 1v1 Ranked toggle, since entering the mode is the mode's consent); the fix only activates when EVERY player in the room runs a version that has it (mixed rooms stay vanilla on all seats).

• Drill bullets fired point-blank into a wall/box no longer vanish for the other players. A same-frame race on the receiving client could drop the drill effect from the bullet's hit processing, so the remote copy died at the wall while the shooter's bullet drilled through and kept hitting — an invisible bullet. The hit is now deferred one frame and the drill re-registered (bug #186's second half; extends the v1.37 drill-position fix).

• FFA: Phoenix no longer respawns players "into thin air" (bug #185). The vanilla respawn coroutine looks the player up by list POSITION, which broke after any leaver in an FFA lobby — the crash left the player alive-flagged, invisible and unhittable on every client (opponents had to suicide to advance the round). The lookup is now by player ID, and a Phoenix whose charge crosses a round transition defers to the round's own mass revive instead of firing into the next round.

• Spectators no longer see phantom "card picking ends in Xs" banners when nobody is picking (bug #184), and a closed pick window no longer lingers at 0s for non-pickers.

• The top status strip no longer cuts off ("2 onli", "(2 in q") — the queue/online text now takes the full remaining row width (bug from the Aug 8 screenshots).

• Jump/land dust puffs now match an equipped body color instead of staying vanilla orange/blue, and the end-of-game VICTORY / REMATCH? text follows the custom team color too (in FFA it uses the winner's color).

• Block stat graph uses one y-axis (bug #182, Stan): the activated and successful lines share a scale like the shots graph; only legacy damage-vs-blocks rows keep dual axes.

v1.38.0 — 2026-08-08 — Hosted lobbies, alerts, chat moderation, animated cosmetics

Schema: migrations 202–206 (202 LFP modes, 203 admin alerts, 204 cosmetic animation frames, 205 lobby kicks, 206 team/FFA colour identity — all must apply BEFORE the API deploy). Deploy notes: the GIF-split endpoint needs Pillow added to the server-side API Dockerfile (fetch the live copy per #192, add pip install Pillow, push back — until then it answers 503 and the multi-PNG path is unaffected); ship step 11 now also POSTs the ENGLISH release notes (en accepted; the Home tab's primary source is the new uncut /release-notes/full/{locale} — post v1.37.0's English body retroactively at deploy so the current notes uncut too); an es/ru seed migration for the new i18n keys is a ship-time step.

Added

• Hosted lobbies are THE way to play custom 2v2s and 1v2s (Sid's follow-up: the old blind manual queue and the 1v2 consent queue are gone from the tabs). v1.37.0 shipped only the server half — no client UI existed. Now: FFA Create Private + password prompts + [PRIVATE] browser markers; full hosted-lobby panels on the 2v2 and 1v2 tabs (create, browse/join with password, member list, host-only Start, Leave) whose state poll keeps the seat lease alive even with the menu closed. Hosts can kick members before start (admins are unkickable, and a kicked player cannot rejoin that lobby); the 1v2 solo-extra-pick is the host's setting now; and every lobby browser shows who is inside before you join — names, titles and elo, with 2v2/FFA elos shown only once established (10+ rated series/games; 1v1 elo otherwise). Start hands off to the normal ready-up/room flow with a match-found alert for idle members; a closed lobby never strands or conscripts anyone. Multi-player flows are first-playtest.
• Standing server alerts. Admins broadcast a notice (outage / issue / update / info) from the Admin tab; every player gets a one-time toast (also for players coming online later) and a persistent banner on every menu tab showing category, message, admin and time. Echoed to the admin Discord channel. Revocable; optional expiry.
• Automatic chat moderation. A hard-slur filter on both chat paths removes the message before it exists anywhere, auto-mutes the sender in all channels for 15 minutes (doubling per repeat offense in 90 days, 7-day cap), logs a system action, posts who/what/action to the admin channel, and tells the sender why their line vanished.
• Animated cosmetic uploads in-game. Multi-PNG sets (name.png + name__f2.png + ... — the picker explains the convention and validates every frame) with an artist-set frame-rate slider in the live preview, or a GIF the server splits at the GIF's own speed. Admin review shows the animation actually moving before approval.
• Max card draw unlocked (FFA). Hosts set 1-5 cards offered per draw in the lobby settings row; non-default values show in the load-in banner and history.
• Watch from the mode tabs. WATCH buttons on the 2v2 live strip, a new Live 1v2 Games panel, and live FFA lobbies — same eligibility rules as the Leaderboard panel, which keeps its buttons. FFA/1v2 spectating is first-playtest; a server-side per-mode switch can pull a mode back without a client update.
• RLFP ping upgrades. Pick any of 1v1 / 2v2 / FFA under the duration selector — the Discord ping reads "LFP: ranked 1v1+FFA for 30min" — and :emojiname: in the optional message renders as real server emojis.
• Deep idle. After 60s unfocused outside any room/battle/match-found, the engine drops to 15 FPS (on top of the existing 120 cap), waking instantly on focus or a match. Toggleable in Settings.
• Shop: New chip + on-body preview. A New filter beside All shows the newest cosmetics; face thumbnails grew 80→112; every face row has a Preview button showing the item on the player body at its real shipped placement — animated items animate.
• Body-color team identity (server half). A 2v2 team is named after its color holder's equipped body color — sole holder wins, two holders coin-flip — decided once at series creation, frozen for the series (rematches inherit the sitting's identity, sides swapped when the split flips; mirror matches leave team 2 vanilla). FFA games stamp each player's color at report time. The stamp rides the series state/live/recent feeds and /ffa/recent, ready for the client tinting pass (points, card shading, Recent panels). Migration 206; actual body colors are never changed.

Changed

• Release notes are uncut and formatted on both surfaces. Discord posts the full notes as multiple messages instead of cutting at 2000 chars mid-sentence; the Home tab renders the complete notes with gold headings, colored bullets, bold/underline/code — and stops wrapping at the author's column width (the actual bug-160 regression).
• Admin tab restructure. Banned users moved to a dedicated admin-only Banned sub-tab (full height + search); the Action Log now lives in-panel where the bans sat, with the searchable full log one click away. Banning 5+ players inside 5 minutes blocks further bans and flags the admin channel; ban failures now surface instead of silently logging.
• Compare tab. The < > metric cycling arrows are back beside the dropdown (both stay in sync); Ranked Friends pie slices are guaranteed distinct colors with an honest legend (tail folds into a grey Other); labels like Bullet Speed size to the cell instead of a hard 10-char cut.
• Chat is visible on every menu tab (except Home, where the pane lives), anchored bottom-left as everywhere else.
• Body-color identity polish. The point/win animation's balls and fills tint to each team's equipped color; card-bar boxes fill with the player's color (outline back to vanilla) and the box letters are always a readable deep version of that same color (pale version on near-black colors) — the first cut only darkened past a threshold and missed the HUD bar's labels entirely, which is why light colors read as blank white squares.
• The FFA host Start button says "Start unlocks in Ns (settings changed)" instead of a countdown that read as an auto-start.

Fixed

• FFA: Radiance no longer damages its own caster. The FFA targeting replacement excluded the shooter by position, so a moving player became their own sun wave's nearest target — one self-hit per wave, which also suppressed lifesteal (the "Parasite not healing" half of the report).
• "Leftover parasite stacks" at round start. End-of-round projectiles could register hits after the victim respawned; every client now despawns its own bullets the moment the round is decided.
• The 2v2 live-series and team-history parsers survive display names containing brackets (they blanked the Live panel, 2v2 tab and spectator HUD line).
• The unfocused-FPS cap can no longer stick if the mod disables itself during an unfocused launch.
• The FFA "GET READY" banner no longer clips its text top and bottom — the banner box now sizes to the rendered text instead of a fixed 260px slot.

Stan's feature requests (#178–181, all accepted)

• Discord FFA results show every player's before→after rating (stamped at match time, so later games never rewrite history), and every ranked result post carries its /game codes — inspect a game from Discord without opening ROUNDS.
• "How stats are tracked" — a Settings-tab page stating the verified mechanics: what counts as a shot, why one block absorbing three bullets is one success, which cards do and don't count as attempts, what Rage Quit % vs Leave actually measure, when the game-length clock runs, and which modes feed which lifetime stats.
• Stat hover graphs redesigned: two-line headers with the legend colored as the lines (distinct hues), real x-axis time ticks scaled to the game's actual length, the block graph now charts activations vs successful blocks (older games keep their honest damage-taken labels), and the marker footer is replaced by a real green/red "point won / point lost" legend that only appears when markers do.
• The graph-vs-summary discrepancy Stan caught was real and is fixed at the root: every stat timeline stopped recording at 6 minutes 24 seconds (a 128-sample cap) while the totals kept counting — nearly every 2v2 and FFA game overran it. Timelines now compress as they grow and always span the whole game. Also found in the same audit: FFA spawn-grace right-clicks were counting as block attempts that could never block — no longer.

Review hardening (Codex adversarial rounds 3–8 — 40 further findings fixed)

• Authenticated requests refuse plaintext transport. If the secure connection ever fails and the client falls back to the legacy endpoint, your Steam session is no longer exchanged or attached, and admin actions and lobby passwords are refused outright rather than sent in the clear. (LAN/loopback addresses are exempt so local setups keep working.)
• Nothing can drop you into a match you didn't consent to. Joining the public 2v2 queue can no longer overwrite a live locked match; a seat in a closed hosted lobby is released instead of being recycled into public matchmaking; leave requests are bound to the exact match they were issued for, so a delayed retry can't dissolve a newer one.
• Preference clicks land in order — the last thing you clicked is what the server stores, and Start waits for it.
• Assorted: DPS graphs no longer halve short games; the card-letter outline can't leak materials; live-column and bets-ledger rows share one height budget; release announcements resume correctly after a crash, restart, or partial post.

Review hardening (Codex adversarial round 2 — 12 confirmed findings fixed)

• Hosted-lobby groups are released (never recycled into public matchmaking) by EVERY dissolution path now — ready timeouts, dead-lock resets, ban evictions, account deletion — via one shared disposition authority; queue leaves are incarnation-fenced so a delayed retry can't tear down a newer enrollment, and joining is blocked while a leave is still settling.
• The chat auth token is never sent over the plaintext fallback socket — a downgraded session stays unverified (censored without strikes) instead of exposing the session bearer.
• Preference writes serialize one-at-a-time with Start disabled until the host's last change is acknowledged; recovery rejoins re-send the current preferences, not a stale join-time snapshot; "Team: Any" clears server-side.
• The team-color coin flip distributes to every seat and spectator via a room property (the continuation response only ever reached one client); an all-vanilla decision is now explicitly frozen so a mid-series color equip can't re-open it; spectators never repaint a watched room with their own previous series' colors.
• The Leaderboard live column enforces a single row budget across all modes so it can never overpaint the bet ledger; release announcements survive bot restarts mid-post and the manual command can no longer mark a partial announcement complete.

Review hardening (Codex adversarial round 1 — 16 confirmed findings fixed)

• Hosted lobbies: survivors of a dissolved hosted 2v2/1v2 start are released outright instead of being recycled into public matchmaking; the client's start-vs-disband recovery uses a new read-only resolve endpoint (the old probe could lock you with strangers); an explicit Leave that races Start now reports "started" and completes through the proper queue-leave; seated preferences are patched one field at a time through a dedicated endpoint (racing Start via re-join could orphan a seat), hydrate from the server, and "Team: Any" actually clears a previous claim; a full kick list refuses new kicks rather than quietly re-admitting the earliest-kicked player.
• Chat moderation: the censor's auto-mute only fires on a socket whose Steam identity is session-verified — an unauthenticated socket could previously mute an arbitrary victim by forging their ID. Unverified hits are still censored, just not persisted as strikes.
• Admin/ops: the ban-velocity gate is race-proof (advisory lock — parallel bans could previously slip past it); admin alert banners expire client-side when timed alerts lapse; the release announcer resumes from the failed chunk instead of marking a partial announcement complete; the Home tab's release feed anchors on ship-time order so editing an old translation can't hoist it above newer releases.
• Animated cosmetics: abandoned half-uploads free their submission slot even at the cap; admin frame review pages one frame per request (a 16-frame submission could exceed the fetch timeout and become unreviewable); GIFs outside the supported 0.5–15 fps band are rejected with the measured rate instead of silently retimed; the release-candidates feed and ship runbook carry frame counts + fps so an approved animation can never ship as a static frame 1.
• Spectating: pulling a mode from the server's watchable set now also evicts existing viewers (heartbeat + fighter validation), not just new grants.

v1.36.0 — 2026-08-04 — Spanish + Russian, translation portal, native cards

Schema: migrations 179–189. 187 adds the FFA kills-tiebreak capability columns, 188 repairs one seeded translation proposal, and 189 carries this batch's 188 new machine-translation proposals — a NEW file rather than more rows in the already-applied 184, because a deploy that tracks applied migrations would never have run them.

Deploy order is not optional: the backend must go out BEFORE the client is released. The client always signs the newer FFA match canonical (which carries kill counts), and only a dual-accepting server verifies it — an updated client against the old server would have every FFA report rejected. The reverse pairing is safe: the new server still accepts the old canonical, so v1.35.5 clients keep working throughout.

Minimum version stays at 1.35.4 at release and is raised to 1.36.0 about two hours later, so players have a window to update through Thunderstore or the auto-updater first.

Added

• The mod speaks Spanish and Russian. Every one of the mod's ~1,470 user-visible strings is translated, and the language is chosen from Settings → Language / Idioma / Язык. Machine-translated drafts to start; community moderators review and rewrite them from a web portal.
• Translation portal at /translate: sign in from the game, propose translations, and review others'. Formatting tags are locked so a translation can't break the layout, and every string has a History view showing the original English, what's live now, who proposed and approved it, and whether the English has changed since.
• Translated release notes. Update notes now appear in your language on the Home tab, labelled as machine translations, falling back to English when a release hasn't been translated.
• Ranked FFA settings are bounded: max cards held is 3–5 for ranked lobbies, and the opening draw can never exceed the card cap (dealing more cards than you can hold just wasted picks and time).
• FFA match history shows the settings each game used — but only where those settings were genuinely chosen; older games show nothing rather than a default they never used.
• Spawn spotlight in FFA: the screen dims around you for a moment at the start of a round so you can find yourself among up to ten identical bodies.
• Chat channels for Spanish and Russian alongside global, both in game and in Discord.
• Admins can appoint and remove translators from the Admin tab (there was previously no in-game way to do it at all).
• Kills now break FFA placement ties. Placements are rounds, then points, then kills; only a full three-way tie still shares a place. Kill counts are now part of the signed match report, which is what makes them safe to rank on — reports from older clients keep the old two-field ordering.
• Cards render natively. Hovering a card now shows the game's own card — drawn live, in your language — instead of a bundled English screenshot. The old images remain as an automatic fallback, and a future release can drop the ~15 MB card image pack entirely.
• Shop items are translated — every cosmetic name and description, with community artists' own item names left as the artist wrote them.
• Chat channels are visible and pickable. The Home-tab chat shows which channel you're in, a selector switches between All/Global/Español/Русский, and you type into your language's channel by default. Your choice sticks between sessions.
• Recent Casual FFAs — casual FFA games get their own history section under the ranked one.
• Date order is configurable: Month/Day/Year (default), Day/Month/Year, or Year/Month/Day, applied to every date in the mod from a new Settings picker.
• Release notes on the Home tab now appear in Spanish and Russian, starting with v1.35.5's notes.

Fixed (August 3 feedback round 2)

• The translation portal expired after about a minute and could not be recovered. The session was always 45 minutes; the page simply forgot its sign-in on any reload. It now keeps the session across reloads, renews itself while the tab is open (up to 8 hours, after which you re-open it from the game), and renews immediately on load so a session restored near its expiry is saved rather than lost.

• The portal's search box and its All / Untranslated / Stale / Has-pending filters did nothing, and the queue reported "200" for both languages regardless of the real backlog. Search now matches across the English source, the current translation and the key, each filter shows its true count, and the queue is properly paged.

• An approved translation appeared to vanish. Approving a proposal removed it from the pending queue and nothing replaced it, so the work looked lost — it was live the whole time. There is now an Approved view listing every live translation with its original English, who proposed it and who approved it, plus an admin-only reset.

• Switching the Home chat's channel scrolled an empty view to the bottom and stranded whatever you had typed at the top of the pane.

• Card Stats showed the bundled screenshot instead of the live card about half the time, and "Remote" never rendered live at all. Not random: our stored card name corrects the game's own spelling mistakes (Leach → Leech, Riccochet → Ricochet, "Poison bullets" → Poison), so for exactly those cards the lookup matched nothing in the game and fell back forever. Every lookup now also accepts the game's own raw spellings.

• The live card render was too dark to read over the in-match overlay; it is now composited onto a solid backing so it reads the same everywhere.

• Changing language needed a restart, and could leave three languages on screen at once. The switch is now staged: translations swap, the font re-arms for the new script, the game's own language follows (previously only written to disk and applied at next launch, which is why card names stayed in the old language), card text and card images are re-rendered, and only then does the page rebuild.

• The Tournament / 1v2 / 2v2 / FFA info popups and the per-player hover graphs were still English, along with the Compare tab and several of its charts.

• Compare-tab charts had no labels at all — including the region-time pie charts. The label element was one pixel shorter than its own text needed, and the truncation rule drops a line that does not fit rather than clipping it.

• Per-game gold disappeared from the Casual and Ranked history rows (series winnings still showed): the cell was 65px and the text no longer fit.

• The FFA spawn spotlight was a large square; it is now a soft circle about three times the player's size.

• The Home tab's update block wrapped at a third of its width in English while Spanish and Russian used the full width.

• Chat is now one merged, time-ordered view by default. "Global" is renamed "English", All shows every channel in send order, you type into your own language's channel by default, Shift changes which channel you are typing into, and the two selectors are separate so reading everything does not force you to pick where you speak.

• Card names were inconsistently capitalised throughout the menu (CAREFUL PLANNING next to Fast Forward, and Target BOUNCE). The game's own table is inconsistent, so names are normalised at display time only — nothing stored or looked up changes.

• The Card Stats tier letters were hard to read. They were already bold twice over; the game's font ships no bold face, so the letters are now larger instead.

• A crafted chat message could pin itself to the bottom of everyone's chat. The message parser matched field names anywhere in the payload, so text typed inside a message could pose as the message's own timestamp.

• Off-screen bullets could be despawned on their first frame, before the engine had finished setting up their pooled effects — which corrupts the pool for the rest of the session. They now get a moment first. (Under investigation as a possible cause of a report that every shot rendered the poison effect.)

• The English update log wrapped at a third of the panel while Spanish and Russian filled it. Not a layout bug: release notes are published with their own line breaks at about 78 characters, so the English text carried its own wrapping wherever it was shown. Those breaks are now removed before display — lists, headings and paragraph breaks are kept — and the panel does the wrapping in every language.

• Admins can appoint and remove translation moderators from the Admin tab again. The in-game controls were missing entirely; the server side had been working the whole time.

• A double KO in FFA no longer passes without explanation. When the last players alive kill each other in the same instant there is no survivor to award the point to, so the round ended with nobody scoring and the next map simply loaded — correct, but completely silent, and indistinguishable from a scoring bug. It now says so on screen. The rule is unchanged (no point, round advances), and every client shows the same result: the host decides the outcome once and broadcasts it, so there is no disagreement between players.

Added (August 3 feedback round 2)

• Thicker menu text, on by default. This is the game's own font rendered at a heavier weight — not a different typeface — and it applies only to the mod's own menus. The Settings row turns it off for the original thickness.

Fixed (August 3 feedback round)

• Achievement names vanished in Russian. Translated names come from a fallback font with taller lines than the row cells; the truncation rule deleted the whole line. Only names kept in English survived.
• Sorting the leaderboard flipped its headers back to English — the sort rewrite path skipped translation. Same class of miss fixed across every sortable header.
• The per-player FFA graphs (Hit/Block/FPS/ping) never opened on hover — the drawing code only ran on other tabs.
• "(65 tot" and "(click t" — the FFA history header and the Discord link line were too narrow for their text; both widened, and the Discord line now reads "Linked to Discord (Click to show)".
• Several Russian labels were clipped (tournament timezone/format buttons, the 1v2 join button); widened.
• Hundreds of remaining English surfaces now translate: the leaderboard detail panel, Card Stats (including localized card names), My Stats history rows, tournament signup/voting block, the bug-report form, settings rows including every performance patch, FFA/1v2/2v2 history internals, and the hold-Tab match overlay.

Fixed

• Bracket resets in double-elimination tournaments could never be recorded. The column storing the bracket side was four characters wide and the value needed eight, so the insert failed every time.
• In-match queue leases had been failing since 2026-08-01, which could free a player's queue slot early. A database parameter-typing bug; no data was lost.
• Blank Shop, 2v2, Tournaments and Admin tabs after changing language.
• Completed achievements showed [X with the closing bracket cut off.
• The Name Styling previews showed nothing after "Preview:".
• The admin bug-report list rendered blank whenever any report's text contained an unmatched [.
• Several messages stated things the code did not do: the bet box documented a number format it rejected; the tournament notice implied Ranked was only enabled temporarily when it stays on; the Artist Studio promised a 30% royalty on gifts, which are not paid; and every banned opponent was described as banned "for cheating" regardless of reason.
• 1v2 no longer advertises a ranked launch, and FFA no longer describes itself as new.

Changed

• Language selection is a picker instead of a click-to-cycle, and it returns you to the same tab instead of the Home tab — you can no longer get stranded in a language you can't read.
• Translation moderators can no longer approve their own proposals; admins still can.
• Translation checks are stricter and fairer: broken placeholder braces are rejected everywhere (they used to be accepted by the portal and then silently ignored by the game), long texts like the FFA guide now fit through the review pipeline, and symbols the English original itself uses (bullets, check marks) are always allowed in a translation.
• Far more of the interface is translatable now. The first-launch data-consent screen, achievement names and descriptions, the "How It Works" guides for 2v2/1v2/FFA, tournament banners, the in-match score lines, queue status lines, and dozens of composed messages (bet results, level-ups, lobby status) previously rendered in English regardless of language; all of them now translate.

Cosmetics

• Spilled Icecream — new community submission, now bundled and renderable. It is not on sale yet; the artist opens stock from the Artist tab.
• Rounds Cat — the artist's approved placement revision rescales it (1.0 → 1.7). The art is unchanged; existing owners will see it render larger.

Known issue — chat ordering on a machine with a wrong system clock

Chat is now ordered by the time a message was sent rather than the time it arrived, which fixes the long-standing problem of scrollback and multi-channel messages appearing out of order. There is one case it does not handle: if your computer's clock is significantly wrong (minutes or more) and the chat history has not loaded yet, or fails to load, your own messages can be placed in the wrong position in your own chat pane. With a fast clock your messages sit below newer ones for as long as your clock is ahead. With a slow clock your message is filed back into history, and it can scroll off and disappear from your pane entirely.

Only your own view is affected — the message is still delivered normally to everyone else, and nothing about matches, ratings, gold, or the queue is involved. Restarting ROUNDS clears it. If you see this, check that Windows "Set time automatically" is on.

v1.35.5 — 2026-07-31 — queue strand root cause, Leave All Queues, shield charge, display toggles

Backend deployed to production on 2026-07-31. Schema: migrations 173 (free stranded FFA seats) and 174 (queue_leases). The Leave All Queues button now reaches players with this client build.

Added

• "Leave all queues" button, in Settings. Removes you from every queue and lobby in every mode at once. Use it if the game thinks you're still in a match you've already left, or if joining a queue keeps saying you're busy. It doesn't affect a game you're actually playing and never touches stats, gold or rating. It's in Settings rather than on the queue tabs on purpose — the player who needs it is the one whose queue tab is misbehaving. If the server can't be reached it keeps retrying in the background, including after a restart.

Changed

• Being "in a queue" now expires on its own. Previously the server considered you busy because a row existed, and you only became free again if one of about fifteen different cleanup routines remembered to remove it — several of which needed your game to still be running and cooperating. If none of them fired, you stayed blocked with no time limit, which is why this kept needing manual intervention. Your slot is now a lease with an expiry that a live game continuously renews; when the games stop, it lapses by itself. Nothing has to remember to clean up, so there is nothing left to forget. Getting it wrong now frees you slightly early — you just requeue — instead of locking you out indefinitely. This also fixed 2v2 specifically, where a stuck slot previously had no time limit at all.

Minimum version raised to 1.35.4. Older clients are asked to update before they can play. The mod updates itself on launch; Thunderstore users update through their mod manager.

Cosmetics

Five new community face items ship with this release — Brain Cane, Casi's mouth, Casicorn's Eyes, Little Pink Buddy and Sniper Medal. Schema: migration 175. Each artist opens their own sales from the Artist tab, so an item may show as not-yet-on-sale until they do.

Fixed (client)

• Shield Charge — and other block-attached card effects — could do nothing for an entire game (#142/#144). After a rematch, a leftover registration from the previous game made the card's setup fail one step before it hooked into the block system. Normal blocking kept working, so the card looked equipped and simply had no effect. The cleanup that was meant to prevent this ran one frame too early — before the game had actually finished destroying the old cards — so it inspected them while they were still alive and cleaned up nothing.
• The chromatic aberration toggle did nothing (#141). It was switching the setting on a rendering layer that isn't the one being displayed. If you had it off, you were still seeing the aberration — including the screen-wide pulse on every hit, which reads as camera shake. Screen shake itself was never the problem; that toggle was working correctly all along.

Changed (client)

• Screen shake is now Full / Reduced / Off instead of on/off, matching the glow setting. Reduced keeps the hit feedback at about a third strength. If you already had shake turned off, that carries over automatically.

Known issue

• Blocking still does not cancel poison ticks (#143). The rebuild that restores it is written but deliberately not switched on: the mechanism that tells everyone in a room to use it doesn't yet guarantee they all switch at the same moment, and a room that's half-switched would show players different health values — worse than the current behaviour, which is at least consistent for everyone. Blocking the initial poison shot still avoids poison entirely.

Fixed (server)

• "Perma stuck in the FFA queue", and locked out of every other queue with it (#124/#139). Leaving a locked FFA lobby has never once worked: the endpoint marks the departure by concatenating the player's id onto the lobby's departed_ids array, and with a plain bind parameter PostgreSQL types that parameter as an array rather than a single id. The driver rejected it, the whole transaction rolled back, and the statement that actually removes the player from the queue — the last line of the endpoint — never ran. Every leave returned an error; 34 of 34 leave requests in one production log window failed, with none succeeding. Because the leftover row reads as "this player is mid-match", it also blocked them from joining 1v1, 2v2 and 1v2, and the game client's retry loop kept the row looking permanently fresh so no automatic cleanup could ever reach it — hence the repeating "the server will clear you shortly" message that never came true. Broken since FFA shipped in v1.35.0; migrations 165 and 171 had been hand-clearing individual lobbies without the cause being known. Schema/data: migration 173 frees any player still stranded (2 freed on apply, plus 1 who escaped the moment the fix went live).

v1.35.4 — 2026-07-30 — rope objects, poison desync, block grace, FFA casual-wait

Everything previously accumulated as "Unreleased" ships in this version: bug reports #125-#140 across two waves plus the July 30 lifecycle-audit closeout. Backend changes were deployed progressively through the day; the client half lands with this release. Schema changes: migrations 167 (FFA damage/kill telemetry), 168 (recover two wiped FFA games), 169 (match-report quarantine), 170 (team_series.room_issued_at), 171 (free a dispersed FFA sitting), 172 (publish Tattered Cape placement rev 2).

Version note: 1.35.3 was cut and its Thunderstore package uploaded, then two more fixes landed from the #140 session analysis (the room-wide rope-scale gate and the 3-4 player FFA teleport guard). Thunderstore versions are immutable, so the corrected build ships as 1.35.4 and supersedes it. 1.35.3 exists only as that superseded Thunderstore package — there is no 1.35.3 GitHub release.

Cosmetics: Tattered Cape ships an approved placement revision — it renders noticeably larger (scale 1.70 -> 2.15). The art itself is unchanged.

Found in Sid's 4-hour session log (#140)

• 3- and 4-player FFA rounds could leave a player un-teleported after someone left. The guard that skips a departed player during the round-start teleport was tied to the map-growth feature, and map growth only starts at 5 players — so in smaller lobbies the base game's own loop ran, hit the departed player, and stopped, leaving everyone after them standing wherever they were while the map changed underneath. The guard now covers every FFA lobby size. The session log caught this race one step short of failing.

Bug reports #131-#138 + lifecycle audit closeout (July 30, second wave)

Client

• Rope-hung map objects no longer fall at round start on scaled FFA maps (#133/#134). Vanilla replaces every physics piece with a networked copy after the map enters, and the re-parent preserved the copy's world SCALE — on a scaled FFA map the copy came out ~6% smaller than the map around it, and a rope endpoint authored near the piece's edge missed its attach probe (one missed endpoint is enough: the saw case keeps the rope but drops the saw). The master's jointless piece then free-falls, synced to everyone. Proven from the serialized map data: the two reported cases cross the miss threshold exactly between the 3% scaling of 1.35.0 and the 6% of 1.35.2. The networked copies now inherit the map's scale factor, which restores both the attach geometry and the pieces' visual size. Capability-gated on the whole room: these pieces are simulated by the room's host and streamed to everyone, so a client applying the fix under a host that lacks it fights the streamed positions with its larger colliders (Sid's live "boxes are vibrating" report from the first mixed lobby). The rescale therefore applies only when every player in the room is on this build — checking only the host was not enough, because the host can change mid-map and silently invalidate that decision. A mixed room behaves exactly as before (no vibration; ropes still break there until everyone updates).
• Poison desync root-caused and closed (#135). The previous fix exempted victims whose stats route damage through the damage-over-time path (Decay holders) — and every tick on such a victim, plain poison included, kept vanilla's per-replica block behavior. Proven from the reported lobby: all four clients ran the fix, two of the four held Decay. The exemption is removed: DoT ticks now always apply on every replica. Blocking the direct hit still prevents a Decay spread entirely; only the unsyncable "block mid-spread" niche is gone — flagged as a deliberate balance call, easy to revert if Sid disagrees.
• The FFA spawn grace now covers block as well as fire (#136). Suppressed at the input layer (the only place that replicates), so every client agrees a grace-window block never happened; the banner says fire AND block unlock together.
• Waiting in a casual game while sitting in an open FFA lobby is now allowed (#132). The lobby seat is only torn down when entering a COMPETITIVE room. When the host presses Start, members get a 5-second on-screen countdown; anyone in a casual game is pulled out immediately (marked as a deliberate exit, never a DC) and auto-joins with everyone else — if the casual exit interrupts the join, it re-arms and retries within seconds.
• FFA score HUD restyled (#138, Stan's suggestion). The translucent black backing box is gone; names carry a drop shadow instead, and every unscored point renders as a tiny grey dot so the first-to-5 target is legible at a glance.

Server & bot

• 2v2 match reports rejected for lifecycle reasons are quarantined, not destroyed (audit item 1). A report landing on a cancelled series is captured whole in the same admin quarantine the FFA path got on July 30 — previously the entire game was lost. Capture is trust-bound: the four reported players must be exactly the series' recorded members with the reporter among them, so the DLL secret cannot be used to spam the admin queue. The quarantine list/accept surface now understands team reports (score rendering + a mode-scoped "later rated results" eligibility check).
• A leave during a live game no longer cancels the group (audit item 2, all three modes) — once the heartbeat-carrying client is the room's floor. 2v2's leave cascade only fires when the series has zero recorded games AND no verified in-game heartbeat; 1v2 and FFA zero-game dissolutions take the same rule, with FFA falling through to the played-lobby departure path. A mid-game leaver is simply marked; the match pipeline owns the outcome. On 1.35.2 clients (no heartbeat sender) leaves behave as before. FFA survivors' queue rows are no longer deleted the moment someone leaves (the janitor's own windows still bound their lifetime), later leavers are recorded even after their row is pruned, and a lobby with a verifiably live game is never closed by the all-but-one arithmetic.
• The in-game heartbeat is verified and means gameplay, not room occupancy. The presence ping's in_match claim only counts when the session token checks out and the pinger is a recorded member of the named group, and the client only sends it while a battle is actually ongoing. The ping fires as the game starts (with transport-failure retry), shrinking the unprotected head of game 1 to seconds. Verification inherits the Steam-auth enforcement ladder — accounts the ladder still treats leniently are verified to the same (lesser) degree everywhere else is.
• Veto semantics split by caller shape. Janitor closers (which re-fire and carry ceilings) keep the conservative "young process = veto" rule; one-shot actors (leave dissolutions, the assembly cancel) act only on trusted positive evidence — vetoing those on ignorance converted failed assemblies into permanent husks. A new janitor arm cancels rowless active 2v2 husks (60+ min quiet, no rows, no live evidence) as the last resort.
• Two blind FFA closers deleted (audit item 3): the janitor's second 3-hour rule and the 2-hour sweep that ran inside every leave request. The janitor's veto-aware dispersed close is the single lifecycle authority now.
• 2v2 assembly timeout measures from room issue, not match time (audit item 4). New room_issued_at stamp (migration 170); 180s deadline; the heartbeat covers a live game whose spawn-confirm POST was lost. The janitor's 2v2 stale-series sweep takes the conservative veto.
• Discord "How FFA works" FAQ updated for host lobbies and forced picks (#137).

Bug reports #125-#130 (July 30, first wave)

Backend + bot were deployed 2026-07-30; the client half ships here. Schema changes: migration 167 (ffa_match_players.damage_dealt, damage_dealt_timeline, kill_timeline, absent; applied).

• T chat works during combat again (#128). It now opens any time the game is running; the only thing that suppresses it is ROUNDS' own Enter chat actually being open. While the box has focus the mod holds the game's own two input flags, so typing can't move you, shoot, ready you up, or confirm a card pick. Also stops our Enter from toggling the vanilla chat open behind it.
• 1v2 rewards are visible and scale with difficulty (#129). 1v2 always paid, but nothing displayed it and the every-5-levels bonus never fired for it. Added the display in three places, granted the level bonus, and scaled rewards by seat, extra-pick handicap, opponent elo and 1v2-leaderboard standing.
• Recent Series no longer eats teammate names (#126). Two-name side labels shared one character budget, so the second name could render as just "..".
• My Stats → Record covers 1v2 and FFA (#130). 1v2 split by seat; FFA win rate, top-3 rate, kills/game, average placement, and damage/game once games carry the new telemetry.
• Discord mentions resolve to names in the in-game chat (#125), and the bot can no longer be used to ping the server via relayed in-game text.
• /game for FFA (#127): discarded cards shown separately, real M:SS time axis, damage and blocks split apart, plus new kills and damage-dealt graphs.

Lifecycle sweep + match-report quarantine (July 30 incident)

Two completed FFA games were destroyed: a timer closed the lobby mid-sitting and the report then came back 409 "Lobby is not active". The root cause is structural — the server only learns a game happened when the REPORT lands, at game END, so every timeout was blind for the whole duration of a live game. A 40-minute FFA is normal.

• Rejected reports are no longer thrown away. A report rejected for a lifecycle reason is captured whole in match_report_quarantine with an admin list / discard / accept surface. Integrity failures (bad signature, unknown players, impossible scores) are still rejected outright and never stored. Accept records approval only — it never re-applies rating, because Glicko is order dependent.
• Timers now need positive evidence. The presence ping carries in_match=<group id>; the dispersed, quiet and sitting-over rules veto when a game is live rather than inferring "nothing is happening" from silence. Bounded by a 3h ceiling, and it will not answer until the process has outlived its TTL so a restart cannot make every group look idle.
• Windows retuned: dispersed close scales with lobby size (60 min floor, 70 at 10 players), husk sweeps 30 → 60 min, sitting-over 5 → 15 min in both the FFA and 1v2 copies.
• The client stopped deleting recoverable reports — 429 (rate limited) and 401 (session lapsed) were being treated as permanent outbox failures.
• Migration 168 restores the two destroyed games for all six affected players: ratings from a full chronological replay of every recorded FFA match plus those two, validated by reproducing the live ladder to within 0.1 elo when the two are excluded.

Remaining audit items (2v2's worse variant, Leave invalidating a live game 1, two more blind FFA closers, 2v2's assembly clock) are listed in docs/TODO.md and detailed in ai-collab/codex-lifecycle-sweep.md.

v1.35.2 — 2026-07-29 — FFA host lobbies, betting reliability, forced picks

Everything below (previously accumulated as "Unreleased") ships in this version. Backend changes were deployed progressively through the day; the client half lands with this release. Schema changes: migration 166 (ffa_lobbies.host_player_id + open-lobby index; applied).

FFA host lobbies (replaces the auto-gather queue; ships with the next release)

• FFA is now played from host-controlled lobbies. Create a lobby or join an open one from the new in-tab browser; the host presses Start once at least 3 players are in (up to 10). Several lobbies can be open at the same time — the old "3 players and a countdown" auto-start is gone from the new client.
• If the host leaves, the longest-waiting member is promoted automatically; an emptied lobby closes itself. Sitting in a lobby counts as your active queue everywhere else, exactly like a locked match.
• Players on the previous version keep the old auto-gather until they update; the two systems run side by side on the server during the transition, with separate pools.

FFA pick window (client, next release)

• Running out the pick timer no longer skips your pick. When the on-screen countdown hits zero, the card you have highlighted is picked automatically (card 1 if you never moved) and a toast announces it. Skipping a pick used to be a way to protect a finished build from the rolling 5-card cap, which defeated the point of the mode's card cycle. Nothing silent: the timer is visible the whole time and the auto-pick is announced on screen.
• The pick deadline is now published by the lobby's host clock, so every player's countdown and auto-pick agree with the clock that actually closes the window — a slow-loading client can no longer miss its forced pick to clock skew. (Mixed-version caveats until the minimum supported version reaches this release: players on older builds don't auto-pick at all, and when the lobby's host is an older build the deadline isn't shared, so this build falls back to a local timer with a wider safety lead.)

Betting reliability (server, live)

• Bets can no longer be stranded when a lobby or series ends without a result. Every way an FFA lobby or 2v2 series closes now resolves its open bets: wagers on games that were actually played settle against the recorded result, and wagers on games that never happened are refunded. A background sweep also heals any bet that slipped through (including two historical ones), so "charged but never resolved" can no longer persist.
• 2v2 bets gained a refund path for cancelled or voided series — previously a cancelled series destroyed the stake outright.
• Settlement writes are claim-based on every path that touches FFA and 2v2 bets — a bet reaches exactly one terminal state, so two concurrent resolution passes can never pay the same bet twice. Series awaiting an admin decision after a disconnect are left untouched until the decision lands.

FFA tab (client, next release)

• Recent Ranked FFAs shows each player's final hand inline, with replaced picks collapsed into a red "+N replaced" chip — hover the card line to see every pick in order. Long card histories no longer wrap into multi-line blocks.
• Titles render after the player name in Recent Ranked FFAs, matching every other surface.
• Long name+title combinations no longer paint into the Rating column on the FFA leaderboard.
• The Info button is the same size in the same place on the 2v2, 1v2 and FFA headers.
• The FFA info popup was rewritten: it now explains the Recent FFAs display (points, unconverted round wins, kills, replaced cards, rewards and rating change), documents the automatic pick, carries the current reward numbers, and is spaced for reading. It also notes that a level-up bonus lands inside that game's gold number — which is how a last place can occasionally out-earn the winner.

FFA gameplay

• Spawn positions were wrong in every 5+ player game. The base game caches each spawn point as a local coordinate at map load and then teleports players to that raw number as a world position — which only holds at scale 1. FFA scales the map with the lobby, so since map scaling shipped, every player in every round of a 5+ player game landed short of their marker, and landing on one of the movable crates applies damage plus an impulse. Fixed at the point the coordinate is consumed.
• Players 5–10 get real spawn points. Maps ship four; the extra slots used to reuse another player's exact spot. Each fresh map is now scanned for solid static ground — skipping physics objects, animated pieces and the networked crates — and falls back to the old duplicate only where a map genuinely has nowhere else to stand.
• Maps grow faster with lobby size (3% → 6% per player above 4). Landed together with the spawn fix, because a larger factor multiplied the old spawn error.
• One second of no-fire grace at the start of each FFA round, so you can react before being shot. Armed at the moment the game actually hands control back, not when the round is flagged live.
• Shield Charge and the rolling card cap — a stale network handler key from an aborted teardown could leave the card's effect unattached; the pipeline now scrubs immediately before every apply.

FFA economy

• Gold roughly matches 2v2 per minute played. FFA was paying about six times less: its XP base was half of 2v2's, it had no flat completion bonus at all, and the lobby-size multiplier only applied to first place — so lobby size paid nothing to nine of ten players. All three are fixed. A five-player win goes from about 13 gold to about 86; last place from 3 to 19.
• Everyone who already played FFA was back-paid the new placement bonus.
• FFA now grants level-up gold, which it never did.
• Better betting odds — minimum 2x in a 5+ player game, up to 5x for a confidently-rated underdog in a full lobby. A brand-new account cannot reach the ceiling.

Queues

• Fixed a lockout that could strand you in "Match found" indefinitely. Leaving an FFA room to re-form the lobby left your queue entry claimed, which blocked joining any queue in any mode. The server now frees dispersed lobbies on its own, and the client recovers when it is holding a lobby but is not actually in a game.
• Betting on a finished FFA sitting is no longer offered, and the server rejects it.

Menus

• Recent Ranked Series now lists 2v2, 1v2 and FFA games alongside 1v1, with the bets placed on each. The per-mode panels are unchanged.
• Rating-history graph benchmark lines use the real Discord rank colours instead of a hardcoded copy that drifted whenever a role was recoloured.
• FFA match history shows every opponent, wrapped and aligned, instead of cutting the list off at four names — and it no longer silently omitted one player per row.
• FFA score-progression graphs use a palette wide enough for ten players; two players could previously draw in the identical colour.
• The in-game bug-report viewer renders attached logs correctly.
• FFA game IDs copy in the same format as every other mode and work with the Discord /game command.

Discord

• Live FFA lobbies and their odds now appear in the gambler channel.
• /game renders FFA matches (placements, per-player stats, cards, score graph).
• Dedicated "How FFA works" and "How 1v2 works" FAQ answers.

Fixes

• Streak achievements have never been granted to anyone since they were added — the code that reads your streak was unreachable from the code that awards them. Fixed.
• Per-opponent session records in FFA are now decided head-to-head by placement. Previously any game you did not win counted as a loss against every player in it.
• Your bet history shows FFA and 2v2 wagers, not just 1v1.
• New players are no longer registered under their raw Steam ID when the game has not yet reported their name.

v1.35.1 — 2026-07-28 — queue single-ownership, FFA gather window, report fixes

Packaging

• Thunderstore changelog trimmed to recent releases — the full-history file crossed Thunderstore's 100KB upload limit and blocked the v1.35.0 package. Older releases now live in the GitHub changelog (linked from the package).

Queues

• Locked-in players leave every other queue (the "ghost in 1v1 Search Ranked" report): a player who queued 1v1 and then got locked into an FFA / 2v2 / 1v2 lobby kept heartbeating their 1v1 row from inside the game — showing as "1 searching" to everyone for the whole sitting and even able to receive a mid-game MATCH FOUND. Now the moment any mode issues a room, the locked players' still-searching rows in the other queues are removed server-side — and the client itself leaves the 1v1 queue when you enter any online game room (with a notice), covering casual/custom rooms too.
• FFA/1v2 rejoin resets your queue timer (bug #109): rejoining after a game restart used to inherit the old row's clock ("in queue 18 minutes already") and a stale rating snapshot; a rejoin while still unlocked now starts fresh.
• FFA gather window extends while people join (bug #111): lobbies no longer hard-start 25s after the 3rd joiner — every new joiner guarantees 20 more seconds of pile-in time (capped at 120s total), so 5-10 player lobbies can actually form. Full lobbies still start instantly.

Reports & Discord

• Admins are exempt from the 10-reports-per-day limit (session-verified, so a spoofed admin Steam ID in the request body still pays the normal cap).
• /faq topic:<title> now matches topic titles (bug #110): typing a title from the /faq list used to fail for every topic because the matcher only understood natural questions.

Older versions are listed in the full changelog on GitHub: https://github.com/SidNDeed/SidsCompetitiveRounds/blob/main/docs/CHANGELOG.md