Seasons

Seasons are a period of time in TaylorBowl. The end of one Season and beginning of another, known as a Season reset, marks a series of resets. Originally, these would occur with major updates, but have recently stopped following this pattern.

The main purpose of Season Resets is to ensure matchups can continue to occur. As time goes on, tracks become further apart in Elo, and at some point many will become ineligible. Season Resets move tracks closer to each other to prevent this. Additionally, User Score is also reset, including all its components, as well as The Sovereign, The Council, and The Pantheon.

Each Season lasts 4 months. New Seasons begin on the 1st of every February, June, and October. However, there is not a regular time of day in which they occur as Season resets as they are a manual effort and vary in how long each takes to implement. Typically, they last a few hours. Before each Season reset, the admin-only command !suspend will be used, which prevents Bowls from occuring after the current Bowl ends and the Queue is empty. The process of the Season reset begins shortly after.

Every Season Reset, users have their Bowls Participated, Bowls Started, Streak Record, First Votes, Hammer Votes, Spent Credits, Ephemera Condensed, and Lyric IQ reset to 0. This only concerns User Score. Current Streaks are also reset. Credits, Ephemera, Ephemera Levels, Perpetua, and Potentia, Personal Rankings, and The Dojo are all not reset.

Because of this, The Sovereign, The Council and The Pantheon are reset, as all users now have 0 User Score. However, those in the Council and Pantheon are remembered through a message in the channel #bowl-headlines.

At the end of every Season, all tracks undergo a “soft reset” of their Elo. The #1 track is placed at 2900 Elo, or the minimum for Tier 0, and all other tracks adjust such that the proportion of distances between them remain the same. For example, a track at the midpoint between the #1 track and 2000 Elo before the reset will still be at the midpoint after the reset.

This regular soft reset ensures that matchups remain possible. As tracks win and lose bowls, those with very high or very low Elo tend to be too far from other tracks for matchups due to the Sufficient Closeness Eligibility requirement. If left unchecked, eventually there may no longer be any valid matchups.

The formula for their new Elo is given by:

$$\mathrm{New\,Elo}=2000+\cfrac{900\cdot(\mathrm{Original\,Elo}-2000)}{\mathrm{Highest\,Original\,Elo}-2000}$$

If new tracks were added at 0 Elo in the previous Season, their Elo are manually adjusted during the Season reset based on the final results from their time spent separate from the other tracks by simply adding 2000. The formula for their new Elo is given by:

$$\mathrm{New\,Elo}=2000+\mathrm{Original\,Elo}$$

The first 9 Seasons were grouped into an Era. Before the end of Era 1, user stats were all-time instead of seasonal. Thus, the results for the Council and the Pantheon for these 9 Seasons were added, and were treated as if they had all occurred in the same Season.

1 New Elo of a new track added from Tier 10 during a Season Reset:

$$\mathrm{New\,Elo}=2000+\mathrm{Original\,Elo}$$

2 New Elo of a track after a Season Reset:

$$\text{New Elo}=2000+\cfrac{900\cdot(\text{Original Elo}-2000)}{\text{Highest Original Elo}-2000}$$

List of Terms

Term	Definition
Era	A period of 9 Seasons.
Season Reset	The series of resets that occur at the end of one Season.