People who follow professional sports remember the storylines, not the spreadsheets. Babe Ruth pointing at the fence. The Miracle on Ice. The 73-and-9 Warriors.

A draft league is a tiny ecosystem with the same shape. There are storylines. Someone wins three series in a row. Someone goes 0-and-too-many in their first season and then wins the championship two years later. Someone trades like a maniac. The records are there, buried in the database.

Badges pull those storylines out and make them visible.

How Badges Work

Every player in your league has a profile. The profile shows badges they have earned across their full league history. Badges are awarded automatically based on what you do across matches, series, drafts, and trades. You do not opt in. You do not claim them. They appear when you have done the thing.

Some badges are common (most active players have several). Some are rare (a handful of players in the entire app have them). All of them point at something specific that happened.

Examples From the Catalog

A few of the badges currently in the system:

• First Blood: win your very first league match
• Iron Man: play every scheduled match in a series with no defaults
• Mainstay: stay active in the league for many consecutive series
• Comeback Kid: come back from an 0-and-2 record in a series to make playoffs
• Flawless Victory: win a match without losing a single game
• Mono Master: win a match running a single-color deck
• Giant Killer: beat a top-rated opponent as a low-rated player
• Dark Horse: win a series after starting outside the top half
• Against All Odds: win a championship from the lowest seed
• Cup Winner: win a series championship
• Cup Sovereign: win three series championships
• Dynasty: win three series in a row
• Founding Member: be in the league since its first series
• Dealer: complete a high number of trades
• Nemesis: beat the same opponent multiple times in head-to-head play
• Elite, Legendary: hit specific ELO rating milestones

We are at over forty badges as of this writing, and we add more when we notice a story shape that does not have one yet.

The Backfill

When we shipped the badge system, we did not want it to start from zero. So we ran the backfill scripts against the full history of every league. Every match, every series, every championship that ever happened in Draftalot got scored against the badge rules. Players logged in and saw a wall of awards from things they did years ago.

That part was the most fun. Players who had been around for a decade got credit for moments they had forgotten. The Founding Members of leagues that started over a decade ago (the oldest leagues on Draftalot date back to 2013) got their badge for being there at the beginning. The all-time champions of long-dormant leagues had their trophies show up in their profiles.

Why It Matters

Standings answer the question "who won." Badges answer the question "what happened." A player who finished fourth in a series can still pick up two badges along the way. A player who quit halfway through can still have a story.

In a casual league this is the difference between people remembering it as "that thing we did for a while" and "that league I was in."

Visit your league's standings or any player profile to see what people have earned. If you spot a story shape that does not have a badge yet, send us your idea.