League Season

A league runs for a fixed stretch of time, chosen when it is created.

The rule

• The season starts the moment the league is created. There is no scheduled or delayed start: a league exists in order to be played.
• Its length is picked from a closed set: 2 weeks, 1, 2, 3 or 6 months, and the end date is derived from it server-side.

The player names a length, never an end date. An end date sent by a client could be one in the past, or one so distant the league never resolves; a length from a known set cannot be either.

Why the floor is two weeks

A LONG contract runs 14 days (TIER_DAYS.LONG, see Scoring & Economy System). A season shorter than that could not hold one to expiry, so a player who bought one would reach the end of the league mid-contract, with the position neither settled nor scored. Two weeks is the shortest season in which every contract tier is playable.

Why the ceiling is six months

Past roughly half a year the Top Read Snapshot has turned over enough that the article market a player joined is not the one they finish in. That is a slow drift rather than a hard failure, so the limit is a judgement rather than a derivation, but an open-ended season would let a league outlive the interest of everyone in it, and nothing reclaims one.

Where this lives in code

LEAGUE_DURATION_DAYS and leagueEndDate in model/league.ts, shared so the creation form offers exactly the lengths the backend accepts. leagueEndDate counts in hours, not days: Temporal.Instant rejects date units outright, because a calendar day is not a fixed quantity of time and an instant has no calendar. A season is "this long from now", which is precisely what a fixed number of hours means.

Related

• League Visibility: the other thing chosen at creation, and who may join once the season is running.
• League Lifecycle: what happens when the season reaches this end date, and the other way a league can stop before it.
• Scoring & Economy System: contract tiers, and the settlement the floor above exists to protect.
• Standings and Podium: which phase shows a live podium, and which shows a final one.