Principled P.E.K.K.A (2026-08-14)

Principled P.E.K.K.A — 2026-08-14 (e1d80e9)

Drop's second named release, and the one where the game starts showing its work. Every ranked score can now explain itself: who checked it, whether it is still being checked, and what happens if it is not eligible. Around that, the profile, the leaderboards, the badge system, and the artwork all got rebuilt.

The story

Radiant Royal Giant made Drop a competitive game. It left one thing unanswered: when a score looks too good, what happens to it?

The answer used to be silence. A leading run would quietly not appear, and nobody — not the player who set it, not the people below it — could tell whether it was being reviewed, thrown out, or simply lost. That is a bad way to run a leaderboard, and it is a worse way to treat someone who just played the best game of their life.

Principled P.E.K.K.A makes the whole process visible. A run being reviewed ranks provisionally while it waits, with a wax seal on its row that says so. Only a run a referee has actually excluded leaves a board. Most games are never reviewed at all and carry no mark, because "cleared" has to mean a person genuinely looked. Every decision is reversible, every exclusion comes with an explanation to its owner, and the evidence behind it stays private.

The same instinct runs through the rest of the release. The You page tells you where your games went and how each one stands. Badges are ladders you can see yourself climbing. The games themselves were re-tuned against their documented curves rather than vibes. And Drop finally has artwork of its own.

Features

Fair Play, in the open. A held run ranks provisionally instead of vanishing, and says "Awaiting the referee" on its own row. Review status is a struck-wax seal — Cleared, Awaiting, Excluded — replacing the old emoji. An unreviewed run carries no seal at all. Owners see a plain-language explanation for an exclusion plus a short run tag for re-review, and the public Fair Play page documents the whole process.

A rebuilt You page. One "Your games" ledger replaces the split recent-games list, Seasons section, and season modal, with filters for season, mode, and review status, month grouping, and personal-best and placement marks. The banner carries your arena, XP, and lifetime games. Clash Royale collapses to a single row, badges open as a strip that expands in place, and account controls — including delete — sit at the bottom where you can find them.

Leaderboards, three bands instead of five. A fixed title with the season clock, a scope row, and the modes as their own artwork. Clan rankings arrived alongside player tags, with a context strip and one empty state covering all five reasons a clan board can be unavailable. Times now read to the millisecond, which is what the tiebreak was already using.

Badges. Twenty-nine ladders across speed, volume, consistency, and a few secrets, each one a counter and a set of rungs rather than a flat trophy. They are retroactive, they never revoke a legitimate achievement, and earned badges can be shared as artwork. Podium badges award at season rollover.

A visual system. Mode artwork for all six games, badge artwork, the app icon at eight sizes, empty-state illustrations, countdown frames, share images, and the official Supercell display font.

Games re-tuned. Rain is endless and accelerating with a real tiebreak; Survival is pinned to its documented curve; Trade opens on three 1v1 reads and follows a fixed ladder; Higher/Lower has three lives and ramps by elixir gap; Practice became an endless, non-competitive drill that earns no XP. A Speedrun keyboard setting deals the keypad as two wide rows, asked for by Drop's fastest players.

Home features a different game each day. All five ranked games now sit in one row in a fixed order, and the hero promotes one of them per day — the same one for every player, cycling through all five.

Release Notes

• Runs awaiting a referee now rank provisionally; only excluded runs leave a board, and season podiums still wait for a decision.
• Review status is a CSS seal at Cleared / Awaiting / Excluded; a run no referee has touched carries no status and no mark.
• One shared classifier drives the owner's history and the public boards, so the two can never disagree about the same run. It fails closed.
• Owner-visible exclusion explanations, run tags for re-review, audited re-review holds, and a reversible ranked-access restriction after operator approval.
• Fair Play, the FAQ, and the run summary all document provisional ranking.
• GET /me/seasons is bounded to one season plus a lightweight season index, and seasons are labelled by Clash Royale season number instead of an internal calendar id.
• Board placements are available per run on request, resolved only for the run holding a player's position.
• Clan leaderboards, player tags, public player profiles, and Clash Royale profile snapshots through the fixed-IP bridge.
• Leaderboard times to milliseconds; leaderboard history walks are bounded.
• 29 badge ladders, retroactive reconciliation, earned-badge sharing, Podium awards at season rollover, and badge reconciliation after referee exclusions.
• Rain: endless and accelerating, board restart on r2, spawn-curve bound, fixed simultaneous life loss and a terminal input race.
• Survival, Trade, and Higher/Lower re-tuned to their documented curves; Practice rebuilt as an endless unranked drill; Void corrected to five elixir.
• Speedrun keyboard setting; fixed dropped iOS keypad taps; game layouts corrected across short viewports.
• Progressive card-art caching across modes, a smaller installed art cache, and a fixed PWA cache upgrade handoff.
• Route-level API observability, telemetry and leaderboard fan-out fixes, and hardened deployment.
• A private, tailnet-only Drop Control Room for account support, separate from the pseudonymous referee path.
• An in-app Releases page with a one-time new-release notice, and the full visual system.

Release range: f4209cc..e1d80e9.