Ranks & Progression
TableCommander tracks your play in a few ways. They look similar at a glance but answer different questions:
- XP measures how much you've played and won
- Ranks are milestones along your XP journey
- Badges and titles mark special achievements
- Skill estimates how good you are
XP#
You earn XP for every game you finish: a base amount for playing, a bonus for winning, and a small bonus for draws. XP only ever goes up. Losing a game still earns you the base amount, and nothing ever takes XP away.
Win bonuses scale with the odds. Before each game, the system estimates every player's chance of winning. Win as the favourite and you get the standard bonus. Win as an underdog and it's doubled. Pull off a true upset against the odds and it's tripled. Beating players better than you is worth more than farming easy wins.
Ranks#
Your rank is a milestone on the XP ladder. As your XP total grows you climb from Squire up through Soldier, Knight, Champion, Paragon, Archon, Mythic and beyond. The progress bar on your profile shows how far you are from the next rank. Because XP never goes down, you can never lose a rank.
Legendary Member sits outside the ladder. It isn't earned through XP; it's a special rank held by supporters. If you hold it, your progress bar still tracks your position on the normal ladder underneath.
Badges & Titles#
Badges and titles both mark specific achievements rather than accumulated play: win streaks, milestones, one-off feats and events. You either did the thing or you didn't, so there's no bar to fill. The difference is how you show them off.
Badges are your trophy case. You keep every badge you earn and the whole collection lives on your profile.
Titles are worn. You can hold many, but you equip one at a time and it appears alongside your name. Rarer feats earn rarer titles.
Skill#
Skill is separate from all of the above. It doesn't measure how much you've played. It estimates how well you play, based on your results and, crucially, who they came against.
Every game updates the estimate: beating players rated above you moves it up sharply, losing to players rated below you moves it down. It's shown as a level from 1 to 10 once the system has seen enough of your games to be confident, which takes around twenty games against a variety of opponents. Until then it stays hidden rather than showing a number that's mostly guesswork.
Variety matters. Beating the same opponent for the twentieth time tells the system almost nothing it didn't already know, so repeat matchups count for less and less each time. A win against a fresh, skilled opponent is worth far more than another win in a familiar pairing. If most of your games are against one regular opponent, expect your skill level to appear later and move more slowly. Play a wider circle and it sharpens quickly.
Unlike XP, skill can go down as well as up. That's the point: it's an honest estimate, not a reward. If you want a number that only ever grows, that's what XP is for.
Skill is built on OpenSkill, an open-source Bayesian rating system in the same family as chess Elo and Xbox's TrueSkill, designed to handle free-for-all pods and team games rather than just one-on-one, so it works across every format we support. It tracks two things about you: its best estimate of your skill, and how uncertain it still is. New players start with high uncertainty, which is why your level stays hidden at first, and every result narrows it. On top of the standard algorithm we add our own adjustments, like the repeat-matchup weighting described above, tuned for open tables where you choose your own opponents.