Ranked FFA: The Third Ranked Queue

Direct answer. Ranked FFA is OpenFront’s third ranked queue: four to ten humans on one large Normal map with no team, partner, Nations, donations, or random spawn. You win by holding strictly more than 80% of non-fallout land, by becoming the last connected human, or by being the largest human at the 20-minute timer — a bot can never claim the win. It runs on six continent maps, opens within a 15-second lobby deadline, and grants a 30-second spawn immunity.

Ranked FFA is the queue the community has been asking for longest, and it is finally real: OpenFront’s competitive ladder now has a free-for-all mode in addition to the 1v1 and 2v2 ladders you may already climb. It lands as a new feature on upstream main — the Ranked FFA pull request (#5888) merged on 2026-10-09, which is after the v0.34.24 release of 2026-10-06 — so it is not yet part of any numbered stable client. That matters for how you read this guide: every rule, number, and version boundary below is verified against the upstream main source at the verification cursor, not against a shipped tag. Once the queue ships in a stable build, these mechanics are expected to hold unless the source changes, but if a value in your client looks different from this guide, the shipping tag is the thing to re-check. The rest of this guide covers what the mode actually is, how it differs from the two ranked modes you already know, the exact map pool and lobby contract, the three ways a ranked FFA match can end, two concrete decision frameworks with numbers, the failure modes that sink new FFA players and the counterplay for each, and how to adapt your play to each map and track your climb. For the ladder-level rules all ranked modes share — the ELO system, the daily free-match budget, and the rating protection — see Ranked Mode & Rating System.

What Ranked FFA actually is, and when you can queue for it

Ranked FFA is a competitive free-for-all ladder. Where ranked 1v1 pits one player against one and ranked 2v2 pits one pair against one pair, ranked FFA drops a group of four to ten humans into a single match with no team structure at all: everyone is their own team, no one is a partner, and there is no ally you can rely on to hold a lane or donate to you. The player count is the first hard contract of the mode. The engine defines RANKED_FFA_MIN_PLAYERS = 4 and RANKED_FFA_MAX_PLAYERS = 10, so a ranked FFA lobby is never a two-person match and never a fifteen-person scramble; it fills somewhere in the 4-to-10 range. That range is doing real work. A public FFA can fill to a large number of players, which is exactly what makes it feel chaotic and what the community complains about when they ask for a ranked version — a ranked queue that matched you into a huge lobby would be the worst of both worlds. Capping it at ten keeps the field dense enough that you can actually outspread or outlast rivals, but small enough that you can still name and track every real opponent on the map. The floor of four means the mode never degrades into a 1v1 that happens to have a few bots around it.

The second thing to internalize is the version boundary, because it changes how you trust the numbers. Ranked FFA is a not-yet-released queue. It was merged into upstream main on 2026-10-09, after the v0.34.24 release on 2026-10-06, so it does not ship in v0.34.24 or in the pinned stable build this site is currently verified against. Every fact in this guide is therefore anchored to the upstream main source rather than to a stable tag: the lobby recipe comes from getFfaConfig() in the server’s map playlist, the player bounds come from the engine API’s GameTypes, the 80% threshold comes from the engine configuration, and the win logic comes from the FFA win-check. The practical consequence is that you may queue for ranked FFA before you can read a stable release note about it, and the guide you should trust is this one (and the upstream source it cites), not a “what’s new” post that may predate the merge. The third and most important reframe: a ranked FFA win is a real, rating-affecting result on a dedicated ladder. This is the gap the community kept pointing at — public FFA has no real ladder, so people substitute win-rate screenshots and finish positions to gauge their skill. Ranked FFA closes that gap: your FFA results now produce a real ranking, which is the entire reason the mode exists. If you have spent time in public FFA and always wanted a clean, skill-sorted version of it, this queue is that version. Treat the “when can I queue” question as “as soon as the client ships the queue,” and treat “how is it different” as the rest of this guide.

How Ranked FFA differs from 1v1 and 2v2 ranked

The single most important thing to internalize is that ranked FFA is not “ranked 1v1 with more people.” It is a structurally different mode, and the differences are not cosmetic — they change what you optimize for on every turn. In ranked 1v1 you have exactly two humans and one clear job: beat your single opponent. You can commit the whole match to one target, you can plan the entire economy around a single threat, and you can measure your progress against one rival’s land count. In ranked 2v2 you have four humans across two teams, which adds a partner: you coordinate a target, you split the map into two lanes, and you can transfer Gold and Troops to a teammate. Ranked FFA removes both of those crutches at once. There is no single opponent to focus and no partner to share the map with; you are one node in a field of up to ten, and you have to hold your own lane while simultaneously watching everyone else’s. That makes the mode harder to plan but more forgiving to recover from: losing a pocket does not lose the match the way it does in 1v1, because you still have the rest of the field to outlast.

The map contract is the second big difference, and it is the one most likely to surprise a player coming from the team modes. Ranked 1v1 and ranked 2v2 both draw from a smaller pool that includes compact map variants, so a meaningful share of those lobbies play on tighter, faster maps. Ranked FFA does not. Its lobby recipe hard-codes gameMapSize: GameMapSize.Normal and a six-entry map array with no compact option, so every ranked FFA game is a large, normal-sized continent map. That is not a minor detail — it is the whole strategic identity of the mode. On a big Normal map you have more space to spread cities, more room for multiple fronts, and a slower, more attritional climb toward the 80% threshold than you get on a compact 1v1 map. The immunity window is the third difference, and it is counterintuitive: ranked FFA uses a 30-second spawn-immunity window, the same as ranked 1v1, while ranked 2v2 uses a 60-second window. The reason is the player count — with up to ten players the field needs the same early protection as 1v1 rather than the longer team-mode buffer, so the first real pressure in a ranked FFA game starts about a minute into the match. Finally, the economy and alliance tools are stripped out to match public FFA: no Gold or Troop donations, no Nations selection, no clan tags to rally around, and no random spawn placement. You enter ranked FFA with a clean, symmetric starting state and no support tools, and every advantage you build has to come from your own play.

Contract	Ranked FFA	Ranked 1v1	Ranked 2v2
Human players	4–10	2	4
Teams	none (solo)	1 vs 1	2 vs 2
Map size	Normal only	includes compact	includes compact
Map pool	6 continent maps	4 maps	4 maps
Spawn immunity	30s	30s	60s
Donations	none	none	yes (team)
Nations	disabled	chosen	disabled
Clan tags	disabled	—	—
Random spawn	off	off	off
Match timer	20 min	20 min	20 min
Win	>80% / last / largest	>50% of opponent	wipe opponent team

The table above is the mode at a glance; the rows are the exact contracts the lobby recipe enforces. When you queue ranked FFA, read it as a large-map, no-tools, multi-opponent attrition match, not as a scaled-up 1v1.

The 6-map pool: what you will actually play on

Ranked FFA plays on exactly six maps, and the pool is locked in the lobby recipe as a fixed array selected by a uniform random draw: Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Australia. Each map is chosen by maps[Math.floor(Math.random() * maps.length)], which means every one of the six is an equal one-in-six (about 16.7%) chance, and the map is rolled once per match — you cannot pick it, and there is no “pick a map with more land” mechanic like the public FFA idea some players proposed. This is a real strategic contract, not a detail: you will learn each of these six continents by heart, and you will learn that ranked FFA is a big-map game on all of them because the lobby is hard-locked to GameMapSize.Normal. There is no compact variant, no small-map fast game, and no map-shape variance within a single continent — the variation comes from which continent you land on and where you spawn on it.

Because every game is a large Normal map, the six continents differ mostly in their land-to-water ratio and their internal shape, and those differences drive your early-game decisions. A continent with a high land fraction and a compact, connected landmass (the kind where most of the map is solid, connected territory) rewards spreading cities early and pushing toward the 80% threshold by land count, because you are converting land that is mostly yours to keep into land you fully control. A continent with large bodies of water — long coastlines, internal seas, or broken-up archipelagos — changes the whole calculation, because nuke-fallout and the exclusion of nuke-damaged land from the win threshold interact with water: the threshold is measured against non-fallout land, so on a water-heavy map the “80%” is a smaller absolute number of tiles, and the fights cluster on the land bridges and peninsulas where the maps are pinchable. The practical habit is to read the map in the first seconds of the match: count rough landmasses, spot the pinch points and the peninsulas, and decide whether you are on a “spread and accumulate” map or a “pinch and eliminate” map. The community’s ranked-FFA discussion is full of exactly this worry — players wanting “maps without big bodies of water” and calling out the warship-on-water problem — which is why the map-reading step matters more in ranked FFA than anywhere else in the ladder: you do not get a compact fast map to hide behind, and you do not get to pick, so the continent you land on sets the tempo of the whole game. Two further contracts worth noting about the pool: randomSpawn is off, so your starting position is not randomized within a pool of spawn points the way some public games place you, and disableClanTags is on, so you cannot use a clan tag to mark territory or signal teammates. Together these mean the map and your spawn are the only fixed inputs before the first move, and everything else is up to you.

The six-map pool also means your ranked FFA ladder is played on the same maps your public FFA is played on, so the map knowledge transfers — but the ranked context changes the stakes. In public FFA a big continent is a place to mess around; in ranked FFA the same continent is a place where every tile you do not control is a tile someone with a real ranking is chasing. The difference is not the map; it is that now everyone in the lobby has a reason to be competitive. Read the map, name the pinch points, and pick your end-state strategy (spread or eliminate) before you build your second city.

The lobby, the 15-second deadline, and the 30-second immunity

The ranked FFA lobby has a hard contract around filling and starting, and it is the first thing that will differ from your 1v1 or 2v2 experience. The lobby wants four to ten human players, and it will not sit there indefinitely waiting for a full ten to arrive. There is a 15-second match-start deadline — the ranked check-in system defines a fifteen-thousand-millisecond start window — and if the lobby has not reached its full player count within that window, the match starts short-handed rather than cancelling or stalling. This is the exact mechanic the community worried about when they asked for ranked FFA, and the way it is implemented is the answer to that worry. The fear was that a ranked FFA queue would split the player base so thin that you could never find a game, and that a full-lobby-only rule would leave you queued forever during off-peak hours. The 15-second deadline plus the four-to-ten range solves both: the queue keeps filling toward ten for the best competitive field, but it is never stuck waiting, because at fifteen seconds it simply starts with whoever is in. A five-player short-handed match is a legitimate ranked FFA match with real rating impact, and it is the norm during off-peak times rather than an exception.

The 30-second spawn-immunity window is the second lobby contract, and it sets the opening tempo. Each player is protected for the first 30 seconds of the match (the lobby recipe sets spawnImmunityDuration to thirty times ten ticks, and the engine runs at ten ticks per second, so that is exactly thirty seconds). During that window you cannot be attacked and you cannot attack other players who are still protected; it is the buffer that lets you place your first city and get a basic economy going before the field turns on each other. Two things make this different from the other ranked modes. First, ranked 2v2 uses a 60-second window — double the FFA and 1v1 value — because a four-player team match needs a longer early breather before the lanes open. Ranked FFA and ranked 1v1 both use 30 seconds. Second, because ranked FFA has up to ten players rather than two, the 30-second window is the one moment in the match where the field is genuinely symmetric and no one has moved yet; it is your window to commit to a map-reading decision. Use the first thirty seconds to do three things: confirm which of the six continents you are on, mark the pinch points and the water boundaries, and choose your opening position so that your first city sits where you can expand toward the most connected land. If you wait past the window to decide, you are reacting to other players’ opening pushes instead of setting them. The immunity is also a timing tell: the instant the 30 seconds expire is when the first real attacks land, so you want your economy and your first defense already in place the moment the window closes, not mid-build.

One more lobby detail changes how you read the early game: there are no donations, no Nations, no clan tags, and no random spawn. You do not start with a Nations bonus to build around, you cannot transfer resources to anyone, and you cannot mark your region with a clan tag. Your starting position is fixed (random spawn is off), so the only variables in the first thirty seconds are your map choice awareness and your expansion plan. Treat the 15-second deadline as “the lobby will start soon — be ready to build” and the 30-second immunity as “the only free time in the match — decide your strategy now.”

How a Ranked FFA match actually ends (the three end states)

Ranked FFA can end in exactly three ways, and reading all three correctly is more important than in 1v1 or 2v2 because the win-check logic is different. The engine’s FFA win-check runs three conditions, and the match ends the moment any one of them is satisfied. Understanding which of the three you are forcing at any given moment is the whole strategic layer of the mode.

First, the threshold win. The standard, intended way to win ranked FFA is to hold strictly more than 80% of the non-fallout land. The threshold constant is 80, and the comparison is strictly greater-than — holding exactly 80% is not a win, you need to exceed it. The “non-fallout” qualifier is the detail that separates FFA from the team modes: land destroyed by nukes (fallout) is excluded from the land everyone is measuring against, so the denominator of your 80% shrinks as nuclear strikes land, and you cannot pad your win by holding a lot of recently-nuked land. In practice this means the threshold win is a real, sustained accumulation game: you have to convert the map’s connectable land into territory you fully hold, and the 80% bar is high enough on a big Normal map that you cannot reach it by early aggression alone — you have to hold it. Because the field has up to ten players, hitting 80% almost always means you have effectively eliminated the other real contenders or pushed them into tiny pockets; the threshold win is usually the end of a game where you have outspread the rest of the field.

Second, the elimination win. The match also ends when only one connected human remains. In a ten-player field the path to this is usually a cascade: you push a smaller player into a corner, they break, their land gets taken or nuked, and the field shrinks to a few real players who are now effectively in 1v1s of their own. If you are the last connected human, you win outright, no threshold needed. This end-state is the “pinch and eliminate” strategy, and it is the one that works on water-heavy or pinchable maps where you can physically block a rival’s expansion and force their land to break. It is also the end-state that most reliably produces a ranked FFA win in a short-handed (five or six player) lobby, where the field is thin enough that eliminating two or three players drops you below the threshold you would otherwise need to hold.

Third, the timer win. Ranked FFA runs on a 20-minute hard timer, and if neither the threshold nor a single survivor has been reached by the time the clock expires, the match ends and the largest remaining human wins. This is the “it’s over, whoever is biggest takes it” end-state, and it matters in two specific situations. The first is a long, balanced game where several players are all in the 40-to-60% range and no one can push past 80% because the field keeps re-fighting over the middle; in that case the 20-minute timer resolves the game to whoever has the most land. The second is a game where the last two or three players are all still connected and none is eliminated, so the elimination win never triggers; the timer then decides between them. The critical property of the timer win — and the one that distinguishes ranked FFA from a chaotic public FFA — is that the contenders list is filtered to humans. A bot can never be the largest remaining contender, and a bot can never take a ranked FFA win off your hands. The engine fills the map with a large bot population to keep the land alive and the game going, but those bots are not eligible to win; only the human players can be the “largest human” the timer crowns. This is the single most reassuring fact for anyone who has lost a public FFA to a bot or to a lopsided late game: in ranked FFA, the win always goes to a real player, and if the clock runs out it goes to the biggest real player, which is you if you are the largest human on the board.

The table below summarizes the three end states and how to force each.

End state	Trigger	How you force it
Threshold	strictly >80% of non-fallout land	outspread the field, hold connectable land, deny rivals 80%
Elimination	last connected human	pinch water/land bridges, break smaller players, reduce the field
Timer	20-min expiry	stay the largest human; survive, keep expanding, avoid breaking

Two decision frameworks: out-spread or eliminate

Ranked FFA rewards players who pick one of two end-states early and play toward it, and the two are genuinely different strategies with different risk profiles. The decision you make in the first minute — after you have read the map and the spawn immunity is about to expire — determines everything that follows. The two are “out-spread to the threshold” and “pinch and eliminate,” and which one you pick should depend on the map, the lobby size, and your own skill at sustained defense versus aggressive pushing.

Strategy A: out-spread to the 80% threshold. This is the safe, high-uptime strategy. You spread cities across the most connected land on the map, keep your land unbroken and defensible, and climb toward the 80% threshold by accumulation. You do not try to eliminate anyone fast; you try to make it so that by the time the game matures, the rest of the field is in small pockets and you are the only one who can still reach 80%. This strategy works best on high-land-fraction continents (compact, connected landmasses), in full ten-player lobbies (where the field is dense and everyone is fighting over the middle), and when you are the better sustained player in the lobby. The concrete plan: in the first minute, place your first city on a high-land bridge or the widest connected region; in minutes 2-5, spread two more cities to cover the two biggest land pockets without exposing your core; from minute 5 on, keep expanding into connectable land and deny the top rival the last land they need for their own 80%. The risk is patience: if you spread too thin, a coordinated or aggressive rival can hit two of your pockets at once and break one, dropping you below the pace you need.

Scenario A (with numbers). You are in a full ten-player ranked FFA on Europe. By minute 8 you hold 52% of the connectable land and the top two rivals hold 31% and 26%; the other seven are all under 10% and mostly in pockets. You are ahead, and the top rival is pushing your eastern pocket hard. Decision: this is a “hold and outlast” game, not an elimination game. You do not commit to breaking the 31% rival yet — you reinforce the eastern pocket, keep your core 52% intact, and let the 26% rival and the 31% rival bleed each other in the middle. Your goal is to keep your 52% from breaking and to pick up the small pockets as the seven tiny players break. If you hold, by minute 18 you will be at roughly 65-to-70% with the field mostly eliminated, and you push the final land to cross 80% before the 20-minute timer. The number that decides the game is your eastern pocket: if it breaks, you drop to ~45% and the 31% rival becomes the threat. So you bank Gold into that pocket’s defense before the rival commits. This is the out-spread strategy in action: you are not trying to win by eliminating, you are trying to win by being the only one left who can still reach 80%.

Strategy B: pinch and eliminate. This is the aggressive, lower-uptime strategy. You target smaller players, physically block their expansion on a map’s pinch points, and force them to break so the field shrinks to you and a few others, after which you are the largest human at the timer or the last one standing. This strategy works best on water-heavy or pinchable continents (where you can physically block a rival), in short-handed five-to-six-player lobbies (where the field is thin and eliminating two or three players wins), and when you are the better aggressive pusher in the lobby. The concrete plan: in the first minute, place your first city on or adjacent to a land bridge that a smaller player needs; in minutes 2-6, push that player’s pocket hard and break it; keep targeting the next-smallest player until the field is down to three or four real players; then either cross 80% (unlikely with a reduced field) or be the largest human at the 20-minute timer. The risk is overextension: if you break one player and then get caught in the open pushing the next, a bigger rival can hit your exposed flank and break you.

Scenario B (with numbers). You are in a short-handed five-player ranked FFA on South America (water-heavy, with land bridges). By minute 6 you hold 40%, the largest rival holds 45%, and the other three hold 15%, 12%, and 8%. You are second, not first, and the 45% rival is the threat. Decision: you cannot outspread the 45% rival to 80% on this map — the field is too big and the water makes it slow. Instead you go aggressive. You target the 15% player who is sitting on the land bridge you need. You push them hard from minute 6 to 10 and break them, taking their land and dropping the field to four real players (you 45%, the big rival 45%, the 12% player, the 8% player). Now you are tied for biggest, and the field is thin. You next target the 12% player, break them by minute 15, and the field is down to you, the 45% rival, and the 8% player. You are now the largest or tied-largest, and the 20-minute timer will crown the biggest human. You do not need 80% anymore — you need to not break and to keep your 45% from being taken. This is the eliminate strategy in action: you are not chasing 80%, you are shrinking the field and being the largest human at the timer.

The decision rule is simple: on high-land maps and in full lobbies, out-spread; on water-heavy maps and in short-handed lobbies, pinch and eliminate. And in either strategy, the one number that decides the game is your own land’s integrity — if your core pocket breaks, you lose the strategy you chose, so defend the pocket that holds your biggest contiguous land block.

Failure modes and the counterplay for each

New ranked FFA players lose the same four ways over and over, and each has a concrete counterplay. The failures are not “I was outplayed” — they are specific decision errors that you can avoid by reading the situation correctly. Here are the four, in the order they show up most often.

Failure 1: treating it like a 1v1 and overcommitting to one rival. This is the most common first mistake. A player comes from ranked 1v1, sees a big rival, and commits the whole match to breaking that one player the same way they would in 1v1. In a ten-player field, that commitment is fatal: while you are pushing the one rival, the other eight are expanding into the land you left open, and by the time you break the target you are at 30% while three other players are at 40%. The counterplay is the “no single target” rule: in ranked FFA you never commit to breaking exactly one player the way you would in 1v1. You pick a strategy (spread or eliminate) and you play toward the end-state, not toward one rival. If you go eliminate, you target the smallest players in sequence, not the biggest. If you go spread, you expand into the open land, not at the top rival’s core. The mental reframe: in 1v1 there is one opponent and one target; in ranked FFA there is a field and an end-state, and the end-state is what you are playing for.

Failure 2: spreading too thin and getting hit in two places at once. This is the flip side of the out-spread strategy, and it is how you lose a game you were winning. You spread cities across the map to chase 80%, and you leave gaps between your pockets. A rival sees the gap, attacks two pockets at once (or a pair of rivals coordinate), and breaks one of them because you cannot defend both. Your 55% drops to 40% in two turns, and the game is over. The counterplay is the “connected land” rule: never leave an unconnected gap between two of your own pockets that a rival can slip through. When you spread, each new city must be reachable from your existing land — you expand into land that touches your current territory, not into a distant pocket you then have to rush to defend. The check you run every minute: can a rival walk from one of my pockets to another of my pockets without crossing enemy land? If yes, close that gap or reinforce the weaker pocket. This is the single biggest reason out-spread players lose — they chase the percentage and forget the connectivity.

Failure 3: ignoring the nuke-fallout exclusion and padding your win with nuked land. This is the subtle one, and it trips up players who win by holding a lot of land. The threshold is 80% of non-fallout land, so land that has been nuked does not count toward your 80% — it is excluded from the denominator. A player who holds 75% of the total map but a large chunk of that has been nuked is actually far below 80% of the non-fallout land, and they are not close to winning at all. Worse, holding nuked land is a liability: it is land that someone can take back, and it is not helping you reach the threshold. The counterplay is the “clean land” rule: when you measure your progress, measure your non-fallout land, not your total land. Before you think you are at 75%, check how much of that has been nuked in the last few minutes. If a large chunk has, you are further from 80% than you think, and you should be pushing fresh, un-nuked land rather than defending your nuked pocket. The second part of this failure is being the one who gets nuked: if a rival nukes your core, your land is excluded from your threshold but it is still a hole in your map. The counterplay there is to keep a Gold buffer and a defense around your core so that a nuke does not break your most-connected region.

Failure 4: overextending the eliminate strategy and getting caught in the open. This is how the aggressive strategy loses. You push a small player hard, break them, and then you are sitting in the open with your economy exposed while you turn to the next target. A bigger rival, who has been watching you overextend, hits your flank and breaks you. You were winning at 45% and now you are at 30% and the game is over. The counterplay is the “bank before you push” rule: before every aggressive push, bank Gold into the pocket you are pushing from, so that if you get hit in return you can rebuild instead of breaking. You also only push a target you can break in the same engagement — you do not start a push you cannot finish, because an unfinished push leaves you exposed. The mental check: before you commit troops to a target, ask “can I break this in the next few turns, or will this drag into a long fight where I am exposed?” If it will drag, bank first or pick a smaller target.

The common thread across all four failures is that ranked FFA punishes single-minded play. In 1v1 you can single-mindedly attack one rival because that is the whole game. In ranked FFA, single-mindedness — on one rival, on one pocket, on one land count — is exactly how you lose. The counterplay to all four is the same underlying habit: always have a backup pocket, always measure your clean land, always bank before you push, and always play toward the end-state instead of toward one target.

Mode and map adjustments, and how to read your ladder

The final layer of ranked FFA is adaptation: how you change your play for each of the six continents, and how you read your climb now that your FFA results are real. The map adjustments are where the 6-map pool stops being a list and starts being a decision-making tool, and the ladder-reading is where the mode’s whole purpose becomes concrete.

Map adjustments. The six continents split into two strategic families, and you should have a different opening plan for each. The high-land family (compact, connected landmasses where most of the map is solid, connectable territory) is the “spread and accumulate” family: your opening city goes on the widest bridge, you spread into the two biggest land pockets, and you play the out-spread strategy toward the 80% threshold. On these maps the game is about connectivity and pace — you win by being the player who keeps their land connected while the field breaks around them. The water-heavy family (long coastlines, internal seas, broken archipelagos) is the “pinch and eliminate” family: your opening city goes on or next to a land bridge a smaller player needs, you target the smallest players in sequence, and you play the eliminate strategy toward being the largest human at the timer. On these maps the game is about the land bridges — they are the only places you can physically block a rival, so you own them early and you use them to force eliminations. The specific adjustment: on a high-land map, defend your core and spread; on a water-heavy map, own the bridges and push. And on any map, the one universal rule is the same: your biggest contiguous land block is your lifeline, so you never sacrifice it to chase a percentage or to finish a push.

Lobby-size adjustments. The four-to-ten range means your strategy also has to flex to the actual lobby size, which you learn the moment the match starts. In a full ten-player lobby the field is dense and the out-spread strategy is usually right — everyone is fighting over the middle, so you spread into the open land and let the rivals bleed each other. In a short-handed five-to-six-player lobby the field is thin and the eliminate strategy is usually right — with fewer players, eliminating two or three drops you to being the largest human at the timer, and the 80% threshold is a slower, harder path. The adjustment is simple: full lobby, spread; short-handed lobby, eliminate. And in either, the 15-second deadline and the 30-second immunity are the same, so your first-minute map-reading is the same — only your midgame strategy flexes to the lobby size.

Reading your ladder. The final adjustment is the one that changes everything about why you are playing: your ranked FFA results are now a real, persistent ranking. This is the gap the community kept pointing at — public FFA had no ladder, so people used win-rate screenshots and finish positions to gauge their skill, and the best players in public FFA had no clean way to prove it. Ranked FFA closes that gap. Your FFA results now produce a ranking on the same system as your 1v1 and 2v2 ladders, with the same daily free-match budget and the same rating protection. The practical change: you can now climb a FFA ladder the same way you climb the other two, and you can measure your FFA progress the same way — by your rating, not by a screenshot. The habit to build is the same as the other ranked modes: queue ranked FFA in your daily free-match budget, treat a loss as data (which failure mode did you fall into?), and track your rating over time rather than your single-game result. The mode is new, so the ladder is still building — the top of the ranked FFA ranking is going to be dominated by the players who have been the best at public FFA, because they are the ones with the map knowledge and the strategy already. If you have been a strong public FFA player, ranked FFA is your home: this is the clean, skill-sorted version of the mode you already play, and your existing FFA skill is the head start the community’s “will there be a ranked FFA” thread was asking for.

Ranked FFA is the third ranked queue, and it is the one that finally gives FFA players a real ladder. Read the map, pick your end-state in the first minute, play toward the 80% or toward the elimination, defend your core, and climb. For the shared ladder rules — the ELO system, the daily free-match budget, and the rating protection that apply to all ranked modes including this one — see Ranked Mode & Rating System. For how to read the win conditions across all modes, see Win Conditions. For the midgame habits that carry over from public FFA into this ranked context, see FFA Midgame Strategy.