Leagues
A tournament is a weekend. A league is a season, divisions, weekly match play, teams negotiating their own times, and promotion and relegation at the end.
5Stack runs one league per instance, made of divisions (the ladder) and seasons (each run through it). Admins enable it from Settings → Application → Leagues.
How a season works
- Register your team while signups are open, and pick the players on your season roster.
- Admins review registrations and place teams into skill divisions. Returning teams keep the division they earned.
- Each week you get one matchup. Either captain proposes a time inside that match week and the opposing captain accepts. You can renegotiate right up until the match goes live.
- If no time is agreed, the match falls back to the league's default match night and time for that week.
- Rosters lock partway through the season. After that only rostered players can play league matches, and a player can only be on one team per season.
- The top teams qualify for playoffs, scheduled the same way.
- Final standings decide promotion and relegation for next season.
Divisions
Divisions are a tiered ladder, tier 1 is the top division, and teams are promoted toward it and relegated away from it. Admins name them (Open, Main, Invite, whatever fits), drag to reorder, and add or remove tiers; remaining divisions renumber automatically.
Creating a season
A season is configured once and mostly stays editable afterwards. Only the match-week count and games per week lock at season start, because they define the generated brackets.
| Setting | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Signups open / close | The registration window |
| Season starts | When week 1 begins |
| Match weeks / games per week | The length and density of the regular season |
| Roster lock week | When rosters freeze |
| Playoff seats | How many teams per division advance |
| Min roster | Minimum players a team needs to be approved |
| Best of / playoff best of | Series length, regular season and playoffs |
| Default match day & time | The fallback for unagreed matchups |
| Promotion / relegation counts | Direct promote, relegation playoff up/down, direct relegate |
Each division's format is chosen automatically from its size, a full round robin when it fits inside the season's rounds; otherwise a Swiss group. A division needs at least 4 approved teams to run; smaller ones are skipped at season start.
A Season readiness panel flags problems before you start: division sizes and any teams below the minimum roster size.
Season phases
Setup → Registration Open → Registration Closed → Live → Playoffs → Finished (with Canceled available throughout). Admins drive this from the season's manage tab: open/close/reopen registration, start the season, cancel, or delete it.
Registration
Captains register a team and select the season roster, split into starters and substitutes, with the minimum enforced up front.
Admins then work the registrations table:
- Assign a division: required before approving.
- Approve, waitlist, or decline (with an optional reason the team can see).
- Declined teams can resubmit while registration is still open.
- Remove a team; during the regular season removal forfeits its remaining matchups to its opponents.
Scheduling
The schedule is the part most leagues do badly. In 5Stack, every matchup carries its own negotiation:
- Propose a time inside the match week window, times outside it are rejected.
- The opponent can accept, counter with a different time, or decline.
- Past proposals stay visible as history.
- Anything unagreed auto-schedules to the default night and time.
Teams get both a week-by-week schedule and a calendar (month or agenda view) showing what's agreed, what's awaiting them, what's live, and what's already played, plus a "needs you" count so nothing quietly slips.
Standings, playoffs, and movements
- Standings per division: W–L record, rounds, round differential, matches remaining, and a clear playoff cutoff line.
- Playoffs are seeded automatically when the regular season completes, and run as a single- or double-elimination bracket (with an optional third-place decider).
- Movements computes promotion and relegation from the final standings, direct promotions, relegation playoffs (up and down), and direct relegations. Admins can override any individual team's movement, then approve all.
- Stats are tracked per season, and Create next season rolls the whole thing forward.
Teams
Every team page carries its league history, the seasons it played, its current division, and the highest division it has ever reached.
Leagues vs. seasons
League seasons are separate from platform-wide competitive seasons, which reset regular-match Elo. A league season is a competition; a competitive season is a scoring window.