Season 0

Season 0: the calibration

FlagX is young, and we refuse to fake otherwise. Season 0 is the founding phase of the ranking, and this page explains what's different about it, because the honest version of "new" is more interesting than a simulated crowd.

What Season 0 means

Every flag starts equal: Elo 1000, zero wins, zero history. The early arena is small, which means early votes are disproportionately powerful. A handful of duels can move a flag dozens of places, rating decimals tick visibly, and the board reshuffles hour to hour. If you play during Season 0, you are not visiting a ranking; you are creating it. That is either meaningless or thrilling depending on your temperament, and we built for the second kind of person.

What we show and what we hold back

During calibration we deliberately do not display raw vote totals. Small numbers invite exactly the wrong conclusion, that the ranking is not worth engaging with, when the truth is the opposite: this is the only period where one voter's taste is visible in the standings. Instead we show what is honest at any scale: rating movements, position changes over the last hour, and the live feed of recent votes. Every number on the board is real. We would rather look small than lie, and everything displayed during Season 0 follows that rule.

The first champion

Weekly champions are normally crowned every Monday. The first crowning is gated on a public threshold of 25,000 total votes, because a champion elected by a quiet room is a pub quiz answer, not a title. The progress toward that threshold is shown on the leaderboard, and when it's crossed, the first Monday champion enters the hall permanently as champion number one, with the asterisk of history rather than the asterisk of doubt.

When Season 0 ends

Season 0 ends when the threshold is met and the first champion is crowned. From then on, vote totals become public, the board carries the authority of volume, and the calibration badge disappears. The votes cast during Season 0 remain in the record; the founders' taps are the bedrock everything later sits on.

An invitation

If you're reading this during Season 0, you're early. Your country's flag is probably not where you think it deserves to be. That is fixable, and the fix is the whole game: play your ten rounds, send your flag's rally link to people who owe it loyalty, and check back tomorrow.