The Ladder and Trophies

Winning a single tournament is a great day. But Braket also keeps a longer score, one that stretches across a whole season and rewards the players who show up and perform again and again. That longer score is the ladder, and its ultimate rewards are real, Steam-visible trophies.

The season ladder

Every arena has a public ladder, and you can find it on the ladder page. It ranks players by points earned across the tournaments in a season, so it is a running measure of who has been the strongest competitor lately, not just who won one bracket on one good night.

The ladder is organized by season. You can view the current season's standings or switch to look at past seasons, each of which keeps its own frozen table. A season is a chunk of the calendar (think quarterly), and when a new one begins, the race starts fresh, giving everyone a clean shot at the top.

How points work

Points come from how you place in ladder-eligible tournaments. Do well, finish high, and you earn points that add to your season total. The better your placement across more tournaments, the higher you climb.

A couple of honest guardrails keep the ladder meaningful. Not every tournament feeds the ladder: casual or community-run "fan" brackets are ladder-ineligible by default, so a side event does not distort the serious standings unless the studio decides it should count. And very small tournaments do not feed the ladder either; a match among a tiny handful of friends is a friendly, not a ranked event. The ladder is reserved for real competition at a real size, which is exactly what makes a high rank worth having.

Your current ladder rank and points show up right on your profile (page 7), so you always know where you stand without hunting for it.

The ladder does not stop at the website, either. When a tournament completes, the season's point totals are pushed to a real Steam leaderboard for the game, so your rank lives on Steam alongside your trophies — visible in the same place your friends already look.

Real Steam trophies for the podium

Here is where Braket does something most tournament sites cannot. When a tournament completes, the top three finishers do not just get a graphic on a web page. They earn a real, Steam-visible trophy tied to their Steam account.

Gold for first, silver for second, bronze for third. The podium on the tournament page shows all three, and each winner's trophy is granted through Steam so it lives with your Steam identity, not just inside Braket. Your trophy case on your My matches page collects every one you have won, and your profile shows your gold, silver, and bronze counts as a permanent record.

In a team tournament, the trophy is not just the captain's. Podium trophies fan out to every member of the winning roster, so the whole squad walks away decorated.

This is the payoff that gives Braket tournaments their weight. You are not competing for pixels that vanish when you close the tab. You are competing for something that attaches to the Steam account you have spent years building, visible to your friends, permanent. Third place in a hard-fought bracket is a bronze you actually keep.

Seasons, and why they reset

The season structure is deliberate. A ladder that never reset would eventually just reward whoever started earliest and calcify at the top. By running in seasons, Braket keeps the competition alive: every season is a fresh climb, a new chance to top the table, and a new set of bragging rights. Past seasons stay on the record so your history is never erased, but the current race is always open.

Put it together and you have two overlapping games. There is the short game, each individual tournament, with its bracket, its drama, and its podium trophies. And there is the long game, the season ladder, where consistency and volume compound into a rank that says you are one of the best here, right now. Chase both. The trophies are forever, and the top of the ladder is a title worth defending.