Ask a battle royale scrim organiser what a match is and you'll get a strange answer. Not a drop — a drop is barely evidence, because you can play the best twenty minutes of your life and get third-partied on the second rotation. The unit is the block: five or six maps back to back, points totalled at the end, and the team on top of that sheet won the night.
Every scrim scene in the genre already works this way. What almost none of them have is a way to make the block do the second job as well — telling you which teams are actually good, as opposed to which team had the best Thursday. That's the job a rating does, and it is genuinely a different question with a different right answer.
This post is about running both at once: a placement-and-kills points sheet that decides the block, and an Elo ladder underneath it that decides the season. They are separate axes in the configuration, on purpose, and once you see why, the setup takes about ten minutes.
Two Questions, Two Scoreboards
Here is the thing that surprises people the first time they run ratings alongside points.
Under a points sheet, the strongest team in the lobby banks the most points for doing exactly what everyone expected them to do. That is correct — points are a prize, and the prize goes to the team that performed best tonight.
Under a rating, that same dominant performance is worth almost nothing. A heavily favoured team winning a lobby it was supposed to win is close to zero new information, so the rating barely moves. Meanwhile a middling team taking second gains a lot, because the rating had them pegged for eighth and it was wrong.
A rating is not a prize. It's a prediction being corrected. Once your community internalises that sentence, half the arguments about the ladder disappear — including the recurring one where the team that won the block looks at the rating column and asks why they gained four points.
So run both:
| Points sheet | Elo rating | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers | Who won tonight | Who is good |
| Rewards | Performance | Performance relative to expectation |
| Resets | Every block, or every season | Never (until you roll a season) |
| Best used for | Standings, prizes, qualification | Seeding, matchmaking, bragging rights |
In Team Up these are two independent settings, and the naming is worth learning before you go looking for them, because it is the one genuinely confusing part of the setup.
The Block Is a Cumulative Series
Start by telling the queue that the night is one event rather than six.
Set Match Format to Cumulative over N rounds — cumulative_5 or cumulative_6, matching your block length. This is the format everything else on this page depends on: the per-round scoring options don't appear at all on Single Match, so if you're hunting for a setting described below and can't find it, this is why.
Two small settings make the scoreboard read like your community talks:
- Round Label →
Map. Twenty characters max. The scoreboard then says "Map 3 of 6" instead of "Round 3 of 6", which sounds trivial and stops being trivial the fourth time someone asks whether "round" means the in-game circle. - Win Condition → Highest score wins, the default. The golf-style lowest option exists for formats where low is good; a battle royale is not one of them.
Placement Points and Kill Points
Under Configure Cumulative Scoring, set the per-round mode to Placement Points and enter your table under Cumulative Points (per place) — a comma-separated list, one entry per place, where anything past the end of the list earns zero. Something close to the ALGS shape:
12,9,7,5,4,3,3,2,2,2,1,1,1,1,1
Kills are separate, and they are not part of that list. They go in under Cumulative Stat Definitions as named stats with a points-per-unit value:
Kill=1
You get up to five of these, so if your ruleset pays for anything else, it fits:
Kill=1, Assist=0.5, Revive=0.5
Decimals are allowed, and each definition can carry a rounding rule (Name=Points=round|floor|ceil) if you don't want halves showing up in the standings. Stat names cap at 45 characters, which you will never hit.
That combination — a placement table plus per-unit stat points — reproduces a standard scrim scoring sheet without a spreadsheet, and it totals as the block runs rather than after it.
Who submits, and why it matters at twenty teams
Stat Submission Mode is the setting that decides whether this is workable at scale, and it has two values:
- Match (default) — one captain submits their team's totals per round.
- Player — every player submits their own.
Do the arithmetic before you pick. A 20-team trios lobby over a six-map block is 120 submissions in captain mode and 360 in player mode, from sixty people, all of whom need to still be at their computer at the end of map six. Player mode is a reasonable choice for a small FFA of solo players who are each their own captain. For a squad scrim block, captain mode is the only one that finishes.
The Rating Is a Separate Axis, and It Fires Once
Now the part people miss.
Everything above is the match score — the in-series scoreboard that decides who won the block. It does not, by itself, touch anyone's rating.
The rating comes from Rating Mode (per series), a distinct setting that fires once, after the final round of the series. Leave it on Elo Rating and the block produces exactly one rating change per team, computed from the final ordering. That is what you want: the block is the event, so the block is what moves the ladder.
The alternative worth knowing about is Elo Rating + Stat Points, which folds your stat definitions into the rating change as well — so kills feed the ladder directly rather than only the standings. Reach for it if your community genuinely believes fragging out should move a rating, and be aware you're then rating a mix of skill and playstyle. Most scrim scenes want points to reward kills and the ladder to reward placement, which is the default configuration.
The trap is the menu names. There are two scoring menus and they persist different things:
| Menu | Persists | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| Configure Scoring | series_* keys — Rating Mode, Rating Points per place |
Once per series |
| Configure Cumulative Scoring | the plain per-round keys — Cumulative Score Mode, Cumulative Points per place | Every round |
The one without "Cumulative" in its name is the one that runs once at the end. That reads backwards and it has cost people an evening. If your placement points are showing up in the standings but the ladder isn't moving the way you expected, you almost certainly configured one axis twice.
Both menus are Discord-only. Match Format is on the web dashboard; the scoring axes underneath it are not.
The Recording Limit That Decides Your Rating Unit
Here is the fact that should drive your biggest structural decision, and it is not obvious from the settings.
/record_match elo — the mention-based command, where you tag players and group teams with parentheses — takes ten placements. First through tenth.
/record_match team_alias — the one that takes team names, for rosters created with /team_admin create — takes twenty-three.
A twenty-team lobby does not fit in ten places. It fits comfortably in twenty-three. So:
- If your teams are named, stable rosters, rate the teams. Create them with
/team_admin create, set a captain with/team_admin set_captain(captains submit results), use a Team Alias rating type, and you can record the entire lobby ordering in one command. - If trios re-form every week, rate the players — and accept that you're recording the top ten and nothing below it.
Recording the top ten is not a consolation prize, incidentally. You do not have reliable placements for the bottom half of a battle royale field; nobody watching twenty teams knows whether the squad that died on the first rotation finished 17th or 19th, and it doesn't matter, because those two results carry almost identical information. Ten meaningful placements describe the field better than twenty guessed ones. Record what you actually know, say publicly that that's what you're doing, and group genuine ties on the same placement — tied entrants are treated as a draw against each other rather than being ordered arbitrarily.
One thing not to do, ever: record the same block as both team results and individual results on the same leaderboard. One event then moves the same people's ratings twice. Pick the unit that matches how your scene actually competes. If you genuinely want both views, they belong on separate leaderboards.
Where the Ratings Come From
The mechanics of turning a twenty-way ordering into rating changes are covered properly in the free-for-all scoring post, and the short version is: the ordering is decomposed into one virtual head-to-head per pair of teams, each is a normal Elo calculation, and the results are summed and then divided by the number of rated opponents so that one event is worth about one match of rating movement rather than nineteen.
For a battle royale, two consequences of that are worth stating here:
Mid-pack barely moves, and that's correct. Finishing 10th of 20 means you beat half the lobby and lost to half the lobby, which is close to no information at all. All the signal is at the edges of the ordering.
This is a volume format, and there's no way around it. Landing spot, circle pull and who happens to rotate into you dominate any single block far more than in a 5v5. A battle royale ladder needs more events before it says anything, and it deserves a gentler rating curve while it gets there — the K-factor post covers how to pick one. Setting expectations about this in week one is much cheaper than defending the ladder in week three.
Setup, Start to Finish
- Create the queue with
/queue_ffa headless,min_playersset to your minimum viable lobby andmax_playersto your full field.join_grace_periodgives late teams a couple of minutes after the minimum is reached. - Set Match Format to Cumulative over N rounds with your block length.
- Round Label →
Map. - Configure Cumulative Scoring → per-round mode Placement Points, and enter your placement table.
- Cumulative Stat Definitions →
Kill=1(plus up to four more, if your ruleset pays for anything else). - Stat Submission Mode → Match, so captains submit team totals.
- Configure Scoring (the other menu) → Rating Mode Elo Rating, so one rating change comes out of the whole block.
- Decide your rating unit — named rosters with
/team_admin createand Team Alias ratings if you want the full twenty-team ordering recorded, player ratings if trios re-form weekly. - Write your placement table into the queue description so it's on screen when someone decides whether to join.
Then run it for a month before you judge the ladder. The points sheet will be right on night one; the ratings need volume.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I run a placement-and-kill points sheet and an Elo ladder at the same time?
Yes, and it's the configuration most scrim communities actually want. They're separate settings: the per-round Cumulative Score Mode (with your placement table and kill stat definitions) builds the in-series scoreboard that decides who won the block, and Rating Mode (per series) fires once at the end to move the ladder. Points decide the night, Elo measures the season.
Why did the team that won the block barely gain rating?
Because the rating expected them to win. Elo updates a prediction rather than paying out a prize, so a favourite topping a lobby it was supposed to top is close to zero new information. The points sheet is where dominance gets rewarded — that's precisely why running both is worth the extra five minutes of setup.
How many placements can I actually record?
Ten with /record_match elo (the mention-based command), and twenty-three with /record_match team_alias, which records by team name for rosters created with /team_admin create. If you want a full twenty-team lobby ordering on the board, rate named teams. Otherwise record the top ten and say publicly that that's the rule.
Should we rate the squads or the individual players?
Squads, if the rosters are stable and named — the squad is the real competitive unit, the decomposition happens at team level, and you skip the attribution problem entirely. Players, if trios are drawn fresh each week. What you must not do is record one block as both, on the same leaderboard: that moves the same people's ratings twice for one event.
Which battle royales does this work for?
All of them — Apex Legends, Fortnite, PUBG and Warzone are the common ones. The configuration genuinely doesn't differ between titles, because what the rating system sees is a placement ordering over teams, and that's identical everywhere. The differences are inside the game. (If your community also runs the head-to-head modes of the same franchise, a 4v4 Call of Duty scrim scene is configured nothing like this — see the Call of Duty setup guide.)
My per-round scoring options have disappeared. Where are they?
They only exist on multi-round formats. Cumulative Stat Definitions and the round label appear for Cumulative over N rounds only; the Cumulative Score Mode also shows for Best Of N. On Single Match none of them render, because there are no rounds to score. Set your Match Format first, then configure the scoring.
Running battle royale scrims on Discord? Team Up totals a placement-and-kills sheet across the block while an FFA-aware Elo ladder runs underneath it, and records a full multi-team ordering in one command. See the battle royale setup guide for the configuration in brief, read scoring free-for-alls for the rating maths in depth, or K-factor curves for tuning a high-variance ladder.