Every Siege community hits the same night. You have fourteen people in voice, ten of whom want to play customs, and five of them are a stack — the same five who play ranked together four nights a week, who have callouts nobody else knows, and who arrived together expecting to play together.
Split them up and you get a balanced game and five people quietly annoyed. Keep them together and you get a 5v5 that is not close, and the ladder learns something about the five randoms it probably shouldn't.
This is not a people problem you can fix by being diplomatic. It's a structural fact about Siege specifically: more than any other tactical shooter, this community is made of stacks. So the decision of what a stack is allowed to do is the most consequential setting in your queue, and it is worth making deliberately on night one rather than discovering it in week three.
Three Answers, and What Each One Makes Your Ladder Mean
There are exactly three coherent ways to handle a stack, and they produce three different ladders.
| What the queue does | What the rating measures | Costs you | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Split them (Party Queue off, Balanced Teams) | Draws the two teams that minimise the rating gap, ignoring who arrived together | Individual skill, as cleanly as customs can measure it | The stack is split most nights, and they will mention it |
| Keep them together (Party Queue on) | A pre-made joins as a unit and lands on the same team | Individual skill plus who you queue with | Games are less even; the ladder partly measures your friends |
Rate the stack (/team_admin + /queue_team) |
Named rosters queue as teams and play each other | Team strength — the actual competitive unit | Needs stable, named rosters and enough of them |
None of these is wrong. They answer different questions, and the third one is the honest answer for a community that has stopped being a pickup scene and become a set of teams.
The failure mode is picking the first one by default — Party Queue is off unless you turn it on — and then handling the stack socially every week, which is the same job as the setting with extra arguing.
If you keep stacks together, know what it does to the numbers
Party Queue's "👥 Join as Party" button gives a pre-made group a same-team guarantee. Once that's on, a player's rating is partly a property of who they queue with: a mediocre player who always queues with four strong friends will climb, because the rating has no way to see that the wins weren't theirs. That's not a bug and there's no clever fix for it inside a rating system — it's what happens when the thing being rated (an individual) isn't the thing that varies (a team).
The clean version of "we want stack nights" is usually two queues: a balanced one that feeds the main ladder, and a party-enabled one pointed at its own leaderboard. Then stack nights are real, competitive and recorded, and they don't quietly inflate the individual board. Two queues cost nothing to run.
Why the Join as Party button isn't showing
Party Queue has real eligibility conditions at runtime, and when one isn't met the button simply doesn't render — which looks like the setting didn't save. Check all of these:
- The queue is a headless queue (the automatic kind, not a hosted-lobby launcher), in versus or anonymous mode.
- Team size is 2 or more. A 1v1 queue has no same-team guarantee to give.
- Team Formation is not Players Choose, any Captains mode, or a no-teams format. All of those already hand team selection to a human, and a party guarantee on top of that is two instructions for the same decision.
- Unique Choice Matchmaking is off. A per-role formation and a same-team guarantee can't both be satisfied in general, so the queue won't try.
- No queue password.
That list is worth reading once now rather than debugging live with fourteen people waiting.
Rate Players at 5v5 — Unless the Rosters Are Real
For a customs queue where teams re-form every night, use Player (Specific Format) at 5v5. The teams are temporary, so there is nothing durable for a team rating to attach to, and every player carries one number earned in the format they actually play.
If your community is genuinely a set of named five-man rosters that scrim each other, invert the whole setup:
/team_admin createeach roster (team_id,team_size,members)./team_admin set_captain— captains are who submits results, so this isn't optional in practice.- Rate them with a Team Alias (Specific Format) rating type.
- Queue them with
/queue_team.
The pairing matters: /queue_team takes predefined teams, and predefined teams are rated by the Team Alias types, not the plain Team types (which key off roster composition instead). Getting this wrong produces a leaderboard that looks empty when you were expecting your rosters on it.
Both models can run side by side on separate leaderboards, which is what a community with a scrim league and a Tuesday pickup night should do.
The Veto: Small Pool, Deterministic Result
Siege's competitive rotation is around seven maps, which is small — and a small pool makes a veto behave differently from how people expect.
Set Map Voting Strategy to Captains Ban (no reroll) and build a pool from the maps you actually play. With seven maps, alternating bans mean six bans total, three each, and the map that survives is the one neither captain was willing to spend a ban on. That's the point of a veto and it's why it beats a vote: a simple majority vote can land on the map four people hate, and a veto structurally cannot.
Now the part that catches people: the smaller the pool, the more predictable the survivor. At seven maps you'll see variety. At five, both captains ban their two worst, and the same map survives most weeks — at which point you have a veto that isn't choosing anything. Two fixes, in order of preference:
- Widen the pool. Add the maps your community is merely lukewarm about. A veto needs more maps than it has bans, or it's just arithmetic.
- Switch to Captains Ban (with reroll), which gives you a second draw when the same map keeps surviving.
Simple Vote remains the right choice for a casual drop-in night where appointing captains is more ceremony than the evening deserves — pair it with a Map Vote Timer (10–600 seconds) so a vote nobody finishes still resolves instead of hanging.
One gotcha with teeth: the map pool named on the queue is not validated when you save it. Point the queue at a pool that doesn't exist — a typo, or a pool you deleted — and the save succeeds, then map voting is silently skipped at match time. No error, no warning, just matches forming with no veto. Create the pool first with /settings map_pool add, then name it on the queue, then run one match and confirm the veto actually appears.
A Scrim Block Is a Series, Not Three Matches
Siege is unusually good evidence per match already — both halves, first to seven, thirty-odd rounds of it. That makes the match a far better unit than a round, and for a scrim block, the series is better still.
If your group plays two or three maps in a sitting, set Match Format to Best Of N. One rating change then comes out of the block instead of one per map, which is the right call for the same reason the fighting game post argues for rating sets rather than games: the maps inside a block are not independent evidence. The second map is played by two teams who have just learned something about each other, and treating them as separate samples overstates what you know.
Leave it on Single Match if your night is genuinely drop-in — people play a map, someone leaves, someone else joins. The honest test is whether your players describe the evening as "a scrim" or as "some games". Configure the one they actually say.
What the Bot Doesn't Do
Being clear about the boundary, because it's the first question a serious organiser asks.
Operator bans are not modelled. The ban phase happens inside your custom lobby, and Team Up doesn't touch it. What Team Up covers is everything around the game: the queue, team formation, the map veto, the result, the ratings, the history, and the tier roles that come out of them.
The practical consequence is that your operator ruleset, your overtime rules and your server settings live in text somewhere, and the highest-value place to put that text is the queue description — on screen at the moment someone is deciding whether to press join, rather than in a pinned message from four months ago that new players have never scrolled to.
The other thing worth turning on early is the anti-dodge machinery: Voice-Join Enforcement removes a player who queues and never joins voice, and Match Cooldown stops an instant re-queue after a dodge being free. Both mean nobody has to be the person who complains, which is the real reason they work. The dodges and no-shows post covers the rules side in depth.
Setup, Start to Finish
- Decide the stack question first — split, keep together, or rate the rosters. Everything below follows from it.
- Create the queue with
/queue_versus headless, team size 5, pointed at a match-results channel and a match-history channel. - Rating type: Player (Specific Format) at 5v5 for pickup customs; Team Alias (Specific Format) with
/queue_teamif you're rating named rosters. - Team Formation → Balanced Teams for the pickup queue.
- Party Queue → on only if you decided stacks stay together, and preferably on a second queue with its own leaderboard.
- Map pool →
/settings map_pool addfirst, then name it on the queue. Verify the veto appears in one live match. - Map Voting Strategy → Captains Ban (no reroll), widening to a bigger pool before reaching for the reroll variant.
- Match Format → Best Of N if a night is a scrim block; Single Match if it's drop-in.
- Queue description → your operator ruleset, overtime rules and server details.
- Voice-Join Enforcement and Match Cooldown on, before the first dodge rather than after it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should a five-stack be allowed to queue together?
It's a deliberate choice with a real cost either way. Off (the default), teams are drawn for balance and the ladder measures individuals as cleanly as customs allow. On, pre-mades stay together via the "Join as Party" button, games are less even, and a player's rating partly reflects who they queue with. The common resolution is two queues — a balanced one feeding the main ladder and a party-enabled one on its own leaderboard.
Why isn't the "Join as Party" button appearing?
Party Queue has runtime eligibility conditions beyond the setting itself: the queue must be headless in versus or anonymous mode, team size must be at least 2, Team Formation must not be Players Choose or a Captains mode, Unique Choice Matchmaking must be off, and the queue must have no password. Fail any one and the button simply isn't rendered.
Does Team Up read my Siege rank from Ubisoft?
No. There's no Ubisoft integration and no rank import — ratings come from the matches your community records. For customs that's the more useful input anyway: your ladder needs to know how your players compare to each other, not to the global matchmaking population at whatever hour it filled.
Our veto keeps producing the same map. What's wrong?
Nothing is broken — your pool is too small for the number of bans. With alternating bans, a pool barely larger than the ban count is fully determined: both captains remove their worst maps and the same survivor emerges every week. Widen the pool first, and only then switch to Captains Ban (with reroll).
Should a three-map scrim be one rating change or three?
One. Set Match Format to Best Of N and the series produces a single rating change at the end. The maps inside a block aren't independent evidence — the second is played by two teams who just learned something about each other — so rating each separately overstates what the night actually told you.
Does it handle operator bans?
No. The ban phase happens in your custom lobby and the bot doesn't model it. Team Up runs the queue, team formation, the map veto, the result and the ratings. Put the operator ruleset in the queue description so it's visible at the moment someone decides whether to join.
Running Siege customs on Discord? Team Up balances teams by Elo, runs a real captains ban over your map pool, and can treat named rosters as the rated unit when your scene outgrows pickup nights. See the Rainbow Six Siege setup guide for the configuration in brief, start with the matchmaking queue guide, or read dodges, no-shows and disputes for the rules that keep a customs night running.