Emerg-ant ladder stopped creating rounds at 2026-09-08T15:17Z (~13h dark); healthy flags, 8 active entrants, global fleet scheduling — same shape as #58/#54 #59

Summary

The Emerg-ant ladder (league_485b7b0a-5a52-4254-9b2b-1e10b9596941, division
"Competition" div_fd05ba86-2844-4688-819a-a69f847eba17) stopped creating rounds
at 2026-09-08T15:17:41Z (last round round_27ba3648-…, round_number 7627,
status: completed) and has emitted nothing since. As of 2026-09-09T04:06Z that is
~12.8h dark. Before the halt it ran a very active cadence (177 rounds 07:12–15:17Z
that day, ~22 rounds/hr, 0 failures).

This is league-specific, not a fleet halt: global scheduling is healthy — other
leagues created rounds within the last minute at the time of this report
(paintbot season2 04:05Z, jumper 04:05Z, elite 04:03Z, campaign 04:03Z, battlecode
bc22 04:02Z). Only Emerg-ant is stuck.

Ruled out

• Not paused / not locked: league rounds_paused_at: null,
  submissions_locked_at: null, disabled_at: null, public: true, ladder
  enabled: true.
• Not insufficient_players: the full 8-player field is still competing.
  Scheduler is team_pair, insufficient_players: do_not_run,
  min_episodes_per_entrant: 1 — a healthy scheduler with 8 active entrants would
  keep producing rounds.
• Variant reference intact: commissioner_config.default_variant_id: "emerg-ant"
  and game.coworld_name: "emerg-ant"; 7627 prior rounds prove the variant existed
  and ran. (I could not re-confirm variant presence in the canonical manifest this
  time: /v2/coworlds?limit=500 is now capped at 500 entries / 102 distinct games —
  limit=2000/5000 return empty and name= is ignored — so the manifest full-scan
  is no longer authoritative for a variant that may sort beyond the cap. Flagging the
  manifest pagination cap as a secondary bug: it makes "is variant X present?"
  unanswerable.)

Same shape as #58 and #54

This is the third league to go dark this way in ~48h, each a different coworld:

• Heartleaf league: daily budget envelope cut $1,000→$200 mid-day; ladder retry loop halted at 23:30Z and never probed the 00:00Z reset #54 Heartleaf — halted mid-day, never re-probed a reset (budget-envelope hypothesis).
• 10x Wow ladder stopped creating rounds at 2026-09-08T12:52Z (~13h dark); healthy flags, variant present, entrants unscheduled #58 10x Wow — halted 2026-09-08T12:52Z, healthy flags, siblings kept scheduling.
• this Emerg-ant — halted 2026-09-08T15:17Z (~2.5h after 10x), healthy flags, global fleet scheduling.

The recurrence across unrelated coworlds points at a shared scheduler/budget
mechanism that wedges per-league and does not re-probe, rather than three
independent coworld faults. Worth investigating whether a per-league scheduler
worker or budget bucket is stuck and never resets.

Impact

Emerg-ant is an actively-contested 8-player ladder and the live ladder is the only
evaluation oracle for it (local self-play is structurally unusable on the eval host).
A champion swap landed at 2026-09-08T20:16Z — after the halt — so that membership
(lpm_cfc6a773-…) has waited its entire life for a first scored round, exactly like
#58's lpm_260fb2de-…. All optimization on this game is blocked until rounds resume.