Lifecycle

Live or not

One question decides everything: does the party have an end time?

Every listing and every access check reads that and nothing else. The stage below is a sub-state of a live party, never a replacement for it.

The four stages

An ended party keeps whatever stage it was in when it stopped. Nothing reads the stage without also knowing whether the party is live, and freezing it preserves “it died while still looking for a server”, which is exactly the thing a host wants to see afterwards.

Two different start times

The gap between them is the time people spent waiting to play. Collapsing the two would make every party look like it began the moment it was created.

The ready-up round

Between “we have a server” and “we are playing” sits the part the members actually have to do: launch the game, connect, and say they are in.

It is a round, not a flag. A party can start more than once — a second search, a different server — and somebody who readied for the first server has not thereby readied for the second. Opening a new round invalidates every previous answer without touching the roster at all.

readyAutoPctintdefault 0

Start automatically once this percent of the joined roster is ready. 0 means off — the match only starts when everybody is ready, or a manager forces it.

A percentage rather than a count because the roster moves while people are connecting: somebody dropping out of an eight-player party should not make a threshold of six unreachable.

readyAutoSecintdefault 30

Grace period between the threshold being met and the match starting.

The countdown is cleared if the roster falls back below the threshold — a countdown that kept running after the people who triggered it left would start a match nobody is ready for.

The client shows the countdown, but a background sweep is what guarantees it fires even if every browser tab closes.

Duration

plannedEndTimedatetime

When the host wants it to stop. Set at creation or edited later.

null — no limit — may only be chosen by a supporter or above. A plain member’s party is capped at a maximum duration from its start.

This is a wish, not the authority on liveness. A background job reads it and calls the same end-party path a host pressing Stop would.

Keeping the two separate is what lets an auto-ended party still show what it was scheduled for, and what stops a clock skew from making a live party read as finished to half the site.

The six ways a party ends

The reason is purely informational; the end time is what actually decides “live or not”.

A host can also leave an end note — free text shown in the “party has ended” notification alongside the machine reason. It is optional on purpose: “the host ended it” is a complete answer on its own, and forcing a reason produces a field full of full stops.

Activity and idling

Every join, leave, chat message, state report and heartbeat updates the party’s last-activity stamp. The idle auto-end job reads it. It is not a display field.