Frequently asked questions

It looks at who's sitting in a voice channel, splits them into two teams (random, drafted, or elo-balanced), optionally hands out lane roles, moves everyone into their team's voice channel with a Start button, and tracks the result, including an optional betting economy and a ranked elo ladder. Everything runs through Discord slash commands and buttons; nobody has to leave the app.

No, every image Shockwave posts (trading cards, team cards, tournament brackets, matchup graphics) is made programmatically with Pillow, a Python image-creation library. Layouts, colors, and text are drawn by code, not generated by an AI model.

No, for most commands. Anyone in the voice channel can build teams, start a game, wager, or check /stats. Adding the bot to a server requires the Manage Server permission (that's a Discord requirement for any bot invite, not something Shockwave adds), and one command, /report-correct-winner, which fixes a misreported result, is restricted to members with Manage Server so it can't be abused to rewrite outcomes after the fact.

No, it's an entirely in-server, made-up currency with no cash value or exchange. Everyone gets 1000 free gold once a day with /daily, and it exists purely to add stakes to /wagering on games.

No, every stat Shockwave tracks (elo, gold balance, win/loss record, betting history) is scoped per-server. Playing ranked games in one Discord server has no effect on your numbers in another.

Team rosters, betting state, and the original voice channel are all persisted to disk as they happen, not held only in memory, so a restart doesn't wipe an in-progress game. The one exception is an open betting countdown's exact timer, which restarts fresh (betting just stays open until the game is reported or cancelled instead of auto-closing); if that matters, the Cancel Game button on the report message cleanly ends the round and refunds any bets placed so far.

Yes. /set's optional size sets the expected size for display purposes, but team formation itself just splits whoever's in the voice channel down the middle; odd numbers land one extra player on a side. Lane roles (use_roles on /make-teams, rerollable afterward with the roster's Reroll button) are the one feature that specifically needs exactly 5-a-side, since there are five named lanes to hand out.

Only lane roles: Top / Jungle / Mid / Bottom / Support, assigned by use_roles on /make-teams or reshuffled with the roster's own Reroll button. Everything else - random or drafted team splits, moving voice channels, the betting economy, ranked elo and matchmaking - has nothing to do with League and works identically for any team-based game played by a voice-channel-sized group.

Exactly the same as League, minus the roles: run /set with team1/team2 once, then use /make-teams or /captains, with ranked:true if you want it tracked, and without use_roles turned on. You get two balanced (or drafted) teams, moved into voice channels, with betting and elo working exactly as documented. This works for Valorant 5-stacks, Rocket League 3v3s, a chess club splitting into two draft brackets, or any other group that needs to be divided into sides and moved somewhere.

Not out of the box. The five roles are hardcoded to League's lanes. If your game has its own fixed positions (an FPS's entry/support/anchor, for example) and you're comfortable editing Python, the role list lives in a small, self-contained spot in the codebase; swapping the five names is the whole change. See the self-hosting guide if you're running your own instance and want to make that kind of tweak.

Yes, the elo system is a standard win/loss rating (the same math chess ratings use), not anything League-flavored. ranked:true on /make-teams or /captains balances teams by current elo and adjusts it after a reported result regardless of what game you're actually playing.

It's a League of Legends reference: Orianna's ultimate, Command: Shockwave, pulls everyone caught in it together into one place. That's more or less exactly what the bot does to a voice channel full of people: gather everyone up and move them where they need to be. The name stuck as the project's namesake.