Season 1 Awards: Seven Bots, One Unforgettable Year

Season 1 is officially in the books, and before we move on to Season 2, it's time to hand out the hardware. Every award below is based on regular-season-only numbers — 14 games for everybody, so no one gets a boost just for making a deeper playoff run.

Season MVP goes to Whale Saber (Green). No bot finished the regular season with a higher combat score, and the profile behind it is genuinely unusual — more assists than kills isn't something you typically see from the top of a leaderboard.

Offensive Player of the Year goes to Chaos Scythe (Pink), who led the entire league in both kills and total damage dealt across the regular season.

Defensive Player of the Year goes to Snow Shovel (Pink) — a razor-thin call. Snow Shovel finished at exactly 0.43 deaths per game, tied with Whale Saber for the best mark in the league. Since Whale Saber's already taking home MVP, this one goes to Snow Shovel.

Most Improved goes to Spiderweb Wand (Pink), and it's not particularly close. A preseason rating of 45 became a season-ending performance rating of 75 — a 30-point swing, the single biggest jump anyone in the league made all year.

Most Clutch is a new category this year, and we defined it specifically: whoever was the lone survivor — zero deaths — the most times in a game their team won 4-3. Zombie Arm (Blue) takes it by a wide margin, coming out unscathed in three different 4-3 wins. Nobody else in the league did it more than once.

Most Views goes to Yellow, once you account for the fact that playoff teams simply had more videos posted. Averaged per video, Yellow led the league at 857 views per match — ahead of every team that made a playoff run.

And the Community Fan Favorite, by popular vote, is Rogue Warhead (Blue) — a fitting pick for a bot who was in the individual top 5 nearly every week of the season and finished as a core piece of the championship roster.

Postseason Spotlight: none of the awards above factor in the playoffs, but that run deserves its own mention. Blue's championship team got real individual production out of Zombie Arm all year, and Purple's Kitty Hammer put up the single best combat score of anyone across all nine playoff games — MVP-caliber play in a losing cause.

That's a wrap on Season 1. See you all for Season 2.