What Clubs are, and exactly how club levels work

Ludo is played out loud. In a house, in a hostel, in a group chat with too many voice notes — the board is an excuse for the conversation around it. A Club in Ludo Vest is that room: a place where people are talking, and matches happen because everyone is already there.

This post is the mechanics. Not the pitch — the actual numbers, the caps, and what the level next to a club name means.

The room

A club has ten voice seats. Tap to take one, tap to leave. You can mute yourself, and you can mute somebody else just for you; an Admin or above can mute a lower-ranked seat for the whole room. The server carries no audio — it owns the seat map, who has their mic on, who is speaking, and the clock.

Underneath the seats is chat, and it is deliberately not a messaging app. Club conversation keeps no history. You see what is said from the moment you walk in; leave and come back and you start a fresh session with nothing replayed. There is no unread count, no pagination and no history endpoint, because a club room is a place you visit, not a backlog you owe replies to.

Five roles, and what each can actually do

The ladder is Owner, Super Admin, Admin, Member, Guest. What makes it work is that moderation is rank-aware rather than a flat "is a manager" flag:

• A manager may kick or re-role only someone strictly below their own rank.
• A manager may hand out only roles strictly below their own. So an Admin can set Member or Guest and nothing else; a Super Admin can also make Admins.
• The Owner can never be removed, demoted or reassigned by anybody.

Founding a club costs 2,000 Gold, and if the club fails to save the Gold is refunded under a paired key — so a failed creation cannot quietly cost you the fee. Public clubs let anyone join instantly; private ones queue a request an Admin approves. You belong to one club at a time.

Capacity grows with the club: 128 members at level 1, rising to 512 at level 7 and above.

The points engine

Everything countable a member does arrives as units of one of five types. Units accumulate per member per UTC day, points are paid only for each whole unit crossed, and each type has its own daily cap.

The "whole unit" rule is worth internalising because it explains a lot of near-misses. Four messages earn nothing. The fifth earns 50. The ninth still earns 50; the tenth takes you to 100. On mic, 299 seconds earn nothing and the 300th earns 100. Those exact boundaries are asserted in tests, so they will not drift.

What does not count

A points system attached to chat is an invitation to spam, so the counting rules push back:

• Messages shorter than 2 characters are delivered but never counted.
• A message identical to your previous one within 20 seconds is delivered but not counted; an exact repeat within 3 seconds is dropped outright.
• Chat is rate-limited to 20 messages per 20 seconds.
• Mic credit is capped per heartbeat, so a client that goes silent for ten minutes and reappears cannot bank the silence — and credited mic time is capped at six hours a day.
• Every credit is idempotent by construction: the activity row is written before any counter moves, so a message resent after a reconnect earns nothing twice.

Member levels and club levels are different things

Two levels get confused constantly, so: your member level is personal progress inside the club, and the club's level is the club's.

Member level

Level N needs 1,700 × N^1.43 member points, with level 1 free. Level 5 lands at roughly 17,000 points. A higher member level raises exactly one thing: your daily gift cap. It does not raise your point rates, and it does not affect anything on the board.

Club level

Each club level is one more block of 3,400 lifetime club points — the level is literally ⌊xp / 3,400⌋ + 1. It is derived from the total rather than incremented, which means a replayed credit can never double-level a club. Club levels unlock club badges and raise the member cap.

Star tiers reset every week

Lifetime points give a club its level. Weekly points give it a star tier, which resets at Monday 00:00 UTC. The tier shown live is the highest threshold reached this week; when the week closes, the finished tier is frozen so it can still be displayed.

Nothing has to run at midnight for this to be correct. A member's daily block carries the day it belongs to, so yesterday's row simply reads as zero rather than being wiped by a job that might not fire.

The gift jar

Gifts are bought with Hearts and sent in quantities of 1, 7, 17, 77 or 777. Price sets the spectacle: under 100 Hearts is a quick impact, 100 to 499 gets particles, 500 to 4,999 gets a full character animation and a callout, and 5,000 or more takes over the room for about four seconds.

Every Heart gifted inside a club also drops one point into the club's single open jar. The jar has a target of 10,000 points and a life of 72 hours. Fill it in time and an Owner or Super Admin can collect; let it expire and it pays nothing and a fresh one opens.

A full jar pays 10 Hearts per thousand points — 100 Hearts for a 10,000-point jar — and here is the part that matters: it is split in proportion to contribution, among contributors who gave at least 100 Hearts. Without that floor, a one-Heart gift would collect a share of everybody else's spending. Shares are rounded down and the leftover Hearts are reported as a remainder rather than handed to whoever tapped first.

Club points are also player XP

Every club point converts to player XP at a rate of 0.1, credited through the same ledger as match XP. Time spent in the room is not time taken away from levelling — which is the whole reason the club is worth being in when nobody happens to be playing a match.

And, as everywhere else: none of this touches the dice. Club level, member level, star tier and jar share are inputs to rewards and recognition. The generator's only inputs are the match seed and the roll index.