How Rhyme Royal Works

Record a verse. Call somebody out, or open the floor. The crowd decides who won.

That's the whole thing. Everything below is detail.

Starting a battle

Pick a beat from the catalogue, download it, record your verse in whatever you already use, and upload it. There's no in-browser recording — you record where you record, and the finished audio comes here.

Two ways to post it:

Open Battle. Anyone can answer. This is where most battles start, and it's the only route open to you before you're ranked.

Direct Challenge. You name one MC and they have to answer. That takes a bit more standing — see below.

Five formats, and they change what people are voting on:

• Clash — bars and disses. Who won the exchange.
• Storytelling — who told it better.
• Prompt — you both take the same topic. Who hit it harder.
• Concept — a persona or point of view. Who sold it.
• Constraint — a rule you both have to work inside. Who pulled it off.

Voting

Voting opens when the second verse lands, not before. Until then there's nothing to compare, and a half-finished battle can't collect a lead.

From that moment the battle is open for 48 hours. When the clock runs out:

• Enough votes, and it settles — a winner, and Royal Rating moves for both MCs.
• Not enough, and it gets one extension to give people more time.
• Still not enough after that, and it closes unrated. The result shows on the battle page, but nothing is recorded against either MC's rating or their win–loss record.

We'd rather show no result than a result three people decided.

You vote blind. While a battle is live the page tells you how many people have voted, but not which way, and not what anyone has said about it. The split, the roll of voters and the comments all appear the moment you cast your vote — and to everyone once the battle settles. Knowing a battle is sitting at 90–10 changes how people listen, and we'd rather have your opinion than the room's.

Votes are public. Once the battle settles — or once you've voted — the page shows who voted and which side they backed. Standing behind your pick is part of it. You can't vote in your own battle.

Not every vote counts the same. The number on the vote bar is the raw count. The result is worked out from a weighted one — a vote from an account created minutes earlier counts for a fraction of one from someone who's been here a while, and votes showing signs of coordination count for less again. Accounts that stick around reach full weight.

That means a battle can look like it's going one way and settle the other. It isn't a fault, and it works identically for everyone.

Bring your people — that's part of battling, and always has been. Bringing ten fresh accounts isn't the same as bringing ten heads, and the system knows the difference. We don't publish exactly what's measured or by how much, because that would just be instructions.

Royal Rating

Every ranked MC has a Royal Rating — RR. It starts at 1000 and moves with every rated battle.

How much it moves depends on three things:

Who you beat. Taking down someone rated well above you is worth far more than beating someone below you. Losing to a much stronger MC costs you almost nothing — the system already expected it.

How convincingly. A 9–1 landslide moves more than a 12–11 squeaker.

How many people voted. A thin battle nudges your rating. A battle the whole room turned up for moves it properly.

That combination means you can't climb by farming easy wins, and you're never punished for taking a shot at someone better than you. Reaching up is the fastest way to move.

Placement

You need 3 rated battles before you appear on the Royal Rankings. You have a rating before that — it's just not on the board yet.

Unrated battles and forfeits don't count toward placement. Only real, community-decided results.

Tiers

The rankings show MCs who've been active recently. Go quiet for a while and you drop off the board — your rating, record and history all stay exactly as they are, you just stop occupying a ranking until you're back.

Direct Challenges

Calling someone out by name is earned access. The Open Arena is always open to everyone; a Direct Challenge obligates a specific person to answer you.

To issue one:

• You need to have finished placement
• So do they
• They need to be within your challenge range — you can reach up, but not all the way to the top from Rookie
• You record and upload your verse first. No empty callouts.

Once you send it, you can't take it back. They get 7 days to answer.

They can hold two challenges at once: one active, and one sealed behind it.

A sealed challenge is committed — the verse is recorded and uploaded — but nobody can hear it, including the person being challenged. It stays sealed until it's actually their turn. Nobody writes an answer to a verse they haven't heard. Everyone can see who is waiting, just not what they said.

The moment they answer the first challenge, the sealed one becomes their active one and their 7-day clock starts — but it stays sealed. They answer that one blind too, and it only unlocks when their reply goes up. A verse is never audible to the person who has to answer it.

You only ever owe one verse at a time. You might have several battles being voted on at once — that's fine, they need nothing more from you. But Rhyme Royal will never ask you to write two answers at the same time.

If they don't answer inside 7 days, it's recorded as a loss by forfeit. The challenger takes the win. Both records show it was a forfeit rather than a decision, and the rating movement is a fraction of a real result — nobody voted, so there's no verdict to honour.

Away Mode

Life happens. Mark yourself Away and no new Direct Challenge can be issued against you.

You get a set number of Away Days each year — more with Royal Pro. Days are only counted as they're used, so coming back early puts the rest back.

Away Mode can't rescue you from a challenge you already have. Anything already active or sealed still stands and its clock keeps running. It stops new callouts; it doesn't pause old ones.

The Weekly

One beat. Everybody. Same week.

A battle needs two people. The Weekly needs one — so you don't have to wait for anyone to answer you. A new beat goes up, everyone who enters writes to that same instrumental, and the crowd ranks the whole field at the end.

Every verse stays sealed until submissions close. Nobody hears anything, including you. Going first costs you nothing and going last gains you nothing — everyone writes blind, which is the only way a shared beat is fair.

When submissions close, the field opens and voting starts. One vote each, it's final once cast, and you can't vote for yourself. You'll be asked to confirm before it counts. Most votes takes the week, and a tie goes to whoever posted first.

The Weekly doesn't move your Royal Rating. A many-way popular vote isn't a 1v1, and it shouldn't pretend to be. It has its own table instead.

The Weekly Table. Every closed round pays points by where you finished — 10 for the win, then 7, 5, 3, 2, and a point for anyone who entered. They add up on a separate board from the Royal Rankings, and your crowns show on your profile. Turning up every week is worth more here than one big result.

Each round has a brief — a theme, sometimes a bar count or a constraint — and the exact deadlines are on the round itself.

Beats

Every beat here belongs to the producer who made it. They're licensed to you for use on Rhyme Royal only.

You can: download a beat, record your verse, post the battle, and share clips of it.

You can't: release a song using it, put it on Spotify or YouTube as a release, sell it, remix it, pull stems out of it, or register it with Content ID or any rights system.

If you want to release a track over someone's beat, buy the licence from that producer. Most of them link their store from their producer page. That link is the whole point — a producer gives you a beat to compete with, and in return their name travels with every battle you win on it.

Fair play

One person, one account. Extra accounts to swing votes or ratings aren't allowed.

A verse is for one battle. Write fresh every time. Recycling a verse you've already posted isn't a fair contest for whoever answered you — they wrote for this battle, and the crowd ends up judging bars aimed at somebody else.

Coordinated voting is detected and discounted. Vote trading, alt accounts, and organised brigading all get picked up, and the votes involved don't count for what the people casting them expect. We don't publish the details of how — that would just be a manual for getting around it.

The short version: vote for who actually won. A rating that everyone games is worth nothing to anyone, including the person at the top of it.

Ratings can be corrected. If we find manipulation, we remove votes, reset ratings, and close accounts.

Anything else

Rules change as the platform grows — vote thresholds, timings and ranges are all tuned as more people arrive, and this page changes with them.

Questions, problems, or something that looks broken: support@rhymeroyal.com.