Tiers, rating and matchmaking

A Symposium pays out twice. Resonance Points are permanent and measure how much you have played — 50 for a win, 15 for a loss. They are what raise your Chord Tier, and they never go down. Harmonic Fragments are spendable — 12 for a win, 4 for a loss — and they buy Movements (25) and refinements to your Prime Chord (10).

Losing pays. Not as much, but enough that a losing streak still develops your Aidolin. The intent is that the fastest way to get better at Aidolin — playing a lot of duels and reading the verdicts — is also the way you progress.

Promotion is automatic and cannot be declined — you cannot linger at a low tier to farm easier opponents. It also cannot be lost.

This is the design decision the whole game rests on, so it is worth stating flatly: the score ceiling is identical at every tier. Every axis caps at 5 for a first-day Architect and for a season champion alike. A 50-word Prime Chord can produce a perfect exchange.

What extra words actually buy is coverage. A thin Chord answers the situations you imagined when you wrote it and goes vague elsewhere; when a duel wanders somewhere it does not describe, your coherence drifts toward the generic middle. A richer Chord has something characteristic to say about being cornered, being ignored, being ahead, being embarrassed. It does not raise your best exchange. It raises your worst ones.

That is a real advantage, which is why matchmaking brackets by tier — but it is an advantage in consistency, and consistency is beatable by a well-chosen line on the day.

Within your tier, an ELO-style Resonance Rating tracks results. Beating a stronger opponent moves it more than beating a weaker one; the same is true in reverse. New Architects go through a short calibration period where the rating moves in larger steps, so you reach roughly the right neighbourhood in your first handful of duels rather than grinding toward it.

Freshly promoted Architects enter a new tier slightly below its midpoint and recalibrate for a few matches, so arriving at Tier 2 does not mean immediately meeting the people who have lived there for a season.

You start matched against a window of ±100 rating in your own tier. Every fifteen seconds without a match, the window widens, up to ±300. After two minutes, adjacent tiers become eligible — Tier 1 against Tier 2, or Tier 2 against Tier 3, never Tier 1 against Tier 3.

And if nobody suitable appears at all, an Echo takes the match rather than leaving you waiting. See Anatomy of a Symposium.

A rough order of operations for a new Architect, offered as a default rather than a rule:

1. Duel four or five times before spending anything. You will learn things about your Aidolin that change what you want to buy.
2. Refine the Prime Chord first, if any of those duels exposed a situation your creature had nothing to say about. It is the cheapest fix in the game and it raises your floor in every future match.
3. Then buy one cheap, frequently usable Movement — a Trunk. Not your signature finisher. The Movement you will invoke in half your exchanges is worth more than the one you invoke once a duel.
4. Then a second Movement in the same vein, and only then something expensive.