Discord leagues

10 Mans on Discord: Queues, Balanced Teams and Elo

Ten people, two teams drawn fresh every match, and a rating whose only job is to make the draw fair.

A 10-man night is the smallest complete competitive format there is. Ten people are around, they want a real match instead of solo queue, and by midnight it is over. Nothing carries to next week except who won and a number that moved — no roster, no fixture list, no standings anyone has to maintain.

That absence is the whole design constraint. Because the teams are destroyed at the end of every match, there is nothing durable for a team rating to describe, so the rating has to attach to the player. And because the teams are rebuilt from scratch at the start of every match, the single thing that decides whether the night is any good is the quality of the draw.

Which is worth being blunt about, because it is usually blamed on the wrong thing: the draw can only be as good as your pool allows. If your twenty regulars span 900 to 1600, the fairest possible split of any ten of them still has a visible gap, and no balancing setting will close it — the algorithm is choosing between bad options. If they span 150 points, the teams are balanced however you split them. When a night feels lopsided, the lever is who is in the lobby, not the setting that divided it.

The second thing 10 mans need, and the one that quietly kills more of them than unfairness ever does, is bodies at the same time. A night needs its full lobby simultaneously — eight people who are each free on a different evening produce zero matches. Everything below is downstream of those two facts.

Setting up 10 mans

The decisions specific to this format. Everything else follows the general setup guide.

1
One queue, one leaderboard, one format

Create the queue with /queue_versus headless at your team size and point it at a leaderboard using Player (Specific Format). Headless means the queue is always open and pops the moment it fills — right for a community where people drift in through the evening. Use /queue_versus hosted instead if your nights are announced, so someone opens a lobby for tonight and it closes when the night ends. Both feed the same ladder; the difference is whether the queue is furniture or an event.
2
Balanced Teams, and know what you are giving up

Leave Team Formation on Balanced Teams and the bot draws the split that minimises the rating gap. The captain modes (Captains — Highest Elo, Random, Volunteer, Host Picks) are more fun for some groups and are a legitimate choice, but be clear-eyed: captains pick on reputation, and reputation lags reality by roughly a season. Choosing captains means choosing the draft as entertainment over the draw as fairness. Start balanced, switch if your players ask.
3
Size the queue to the pool, not to the ideal

A queue that needs ten and reliably gets seven does not run. Two honest options when your pool is thin: drop the team size (a 4v4 night that happens beats a 5v5 night that does not), or set a queue timeout so people are not parked in a lobby that will never fill and stop bothering to join. The number to watch is not how many are in your server, it is how many are online on the same evening.
4
Vote the map instead of arguing about it

Attach a map pool and let /map_vote or a captains-ban mode resolve it. One caution specific to this format: a pool barely larger than the ban count is fully determined — with a four-map pool and two bans per side, the same map survives every single week. If your veto keeps producing the same map, add maps rather than changing the veto mode.
5
One result, reported from the panel

Results go in through the match panel, or with /record_match if the lobby ended messily. Decide before your first night who reports — the winning team, a fixed pair of admins, whoever is fastest — because "everybody can report" and "nobody reported" are the same outcome by Thursday. Every rating on the board is downstream of this one habit.
6
Make the ladder visible, and make it earned

Set up tier roles with /tiers so rank shows up in the member list — it is the cheapest retention mechanism the platform has. Pair it with a minimum-matches-to-rank setting on the leaderboard so a visitor who played one night does not appear ranked above regulars on the strength of a single lucky game.

Commands you'll use

/queue_versus Create a versus queue or lobby launcher /map_vote Start a map vote for players /record_match Record match results and update player ratings /tiers Manage tiers and their associated roles

Games that run this

Not a supported-games list — nothing here is title-specific. These are the games whose own setup page has something extra to say about this format.

Valorant

Elo-balanced 10 mans, captain map veto, and a ladder that survives a smurf.

Counter-Strike 2

Pug queues with real veto, MR12-aware rating weight, and auto-recorded results from your own server.

Overwatch 2

A 1-2-2 role lock the queue actually enforces, and a separate rating for every role you play.

Rainbow Six Siege

Customs with a real map ban, series that decide the rating, and a queue that knows what to do with a five-stack.

10 Mans guides

Balanced Teams Are Working. Your Pool Isn't.

When a 10-man night feels lopsided the balancer gets blamed, and it is almost never the balancer — it hits its target on the overwhelming majority of nights. What it cannot fix is the spread of the ten people in the lobby, and that is the only lever you actually have.

10 min read

Also worth reading

Written about the wider problem rather than about this format, but they cover what 10 mans run into.

How to Run Valorant 10 Mans with Elo Rankings on Discord

Set up automated Valorant 10 mans in your Discord server with Elo-balanced teams, map voting, and stat tracking. No more arguing about teams or losing track of who's good.

10 min read

CS2 10 Mans: Veto, Variance, and a Leaderboard That Survives MR12

Running your own CS2 pugs means making decisions Premier makes for you — which veto format, how to seed new players, and how to stop a 13-11 scoreline moving ratings like a 13-2. Here's how to configure each one.

9 min read

How to Set Up Matchmaking Queues in Your Discord Server

Set up automated matchmaking for Valorant customs (or any competitive game) in your Discord server. Players join a queue, the bot balances teams by Elo, and the match starts. No coordination needed.

6 min read

The Attribution Problem: Rating Individual Players in Team Games

A 5v5 win is one bit of information split five ways. How Elo assigns individual credit from a team result, why the naive even split is wrong, and what you can and can't fix with stats.

8 min read

10 Mans on Discord — FAQ

The questions communities ask before setting this up.

How many people do I need before 10 mans work?

Enough that ten of them are online at once, which in practice means a pool several times the lobby size. Twenty to twenty-five regulars is the point at which a weekly night fills reliably without anyone chasing people. Below that, 10 mans still work as an announced event — you just have to announce them rather than leaving a queue open and hoping.

Balanced teams or captains drafting?

Balanced teams produce fairer matches; captains produce a better twenty minutes before the match. Balanced is the better default because it removes the reputation bias the ratings exist to replace, but plenty of communities run captains deliberately and are right to. What you should not do is run captains and then complain the teams are uneven — that is the trade you made.

Do 10 mans need their own leaderboard if we also run other formats?

They need their own rating, which is not quite the same question. A leaderboard using Player (Specific Format) already keeps a separate rating per format, so 5v5 nights and 1v1s on the same board do not contaminate each other. Reach for a second leaderboard when the populations differ rather than the format — a separate ladder for a different game, or for a season you want to end cleanly.

One bad night just tanked someone. Is that normal?

It is normal, and it is adjustable. Rating movement per match is set by the K-factor, and gain and loss caps limit what any single result can do. If your nights are short — few matches, high variance — a lower K makes the ladder describe the season rather than the evening. Turning it down is a legitimate answer to "the ratings feel jumpy", not a fudge.

Ready to run it?

Team Up is free to start. Add the bot, create a leaderboard, and record your first match — the ladder builds itself from there.

Get started free See other formats