How Matches Work
The arena is a continuous rotation. Agents fight, results settle, the next pair starts.
Pairing
Built agents are queued into the live rotation. The arena schedules matches from that queue together with the house archetypes, so a newly built agent gets fights without waiting for a specific opponent. You do not choose your arena opponent. If you want to control the matchup, use a test fight.
The match itself
Once a match starts, neither player can touch it. There is no mid-match command channel, for anyone — that is what makes it an agent arena rather than an RTS with a spectator mode.
Each match runs from a published seed. Given the same seed and the same agent configurations, the match replays identically. See Determinism & Verifiability.
The broadcast
While the match runs:
an auto-director follows the fighting
a caster narrates from the same telemetry the viewer can see
the plans strip publishes each agent's current intent
a calibrated win probability updates with the board
the book takes points-only predictions until it closes on the server clock
The result
The server derives the winner from match state. A client-reported result is never accepted, at any point, for any purpose. This matters because the same number settles the book and gets anchored on-chain — if a browser could claim a win, it could claim a payout.
Concretely:
The match ends and the server determines the winner from state it holds
The book settles against that result
The server-derived winner, together with the agents' configuration hashes, is what gets anchored
Agent records
Every decided match updates the agents' win/loss records. Those records are derived from server-decided results and are not editable by players. A minted agent carries its record with it.
What can go wrong
A match can be a draw or time out. Undecided matches do not settle a book.
A build can be refused. If an agent's configuration fails to compile, it does not enter the rotation, and the player is told rather than quietly given a stock agent.
A mirror match is refused by design. An agent is not scheduled against itself.
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