Every competitive ranking system eventually has to answer the same uncomfortable question: what happens to everyone's rank when the season ends? Wipe it and start clean, and you punish the players who earned their spot fairly. Carry it over untouched, and the ladder never resets, ranks inflate forever, and "Season 7 Diamond" means nothing next to "Season 1 Diamond."
TypeClash's season system supports two strategies under the hood: a hard reset, and a soft demotion. Soft demotion is the default, and it works exactly like it sounds - a portion of your season-end points carries into the new season instead of all of it or none of it. You don't start from the bottom, and you don't just keep your exact rank either. You land somewhere in between, calibrated to where you actually finished.
The reasoning is less about being generous and more about what a rank is supposed to mean. A rank that resets to zero every season measures "how good are you right now, this week." A rank that never resets measures "how long have you been playing." Soft demotion is trying to measure something closer to skill that persists but can also erode - which, if you've ever taken a few months off a competitive game and came back rusty, is a lot closer to how skill actually behaves.
It also solves a quieter problem: without some carryover, the first week of every new season would just be everyone's true skill re-sorting itself from scratch through hundreds of matches. Partial carryover means the ladder starts the season already roughly shaped like it should be.