/leaderboards/options is the ONLY mode-related endpoint the real client has ever
requested, and we answer {} because FUT_MODES is off. Three of its seven occurrences
are followed within ~2 minutes by /user/accountinfo and a fresh /ut/auth, which is the
signature of hitting an error, returning to the main menu, and re-entering FUT.
Hypothesis: the client fetches mode options on entering the play area, caches them, and
later refuses Seasons from that cached EMPTY body without issuing another request. That
would explain the zero-requests-at-failure observation, which no response-shape theory
has been able to account for: the deciding fetch happened minutes earlier.
Stated as a hypothesis, not a finding. The correlation is real; the causation is not
established. Cheap to test: leaderboard_route already implements an options body behind
FUT_MODES=1.
Risk noted in advance: FUT_MODES=1 also enables /season, whose array-root shape is a
flagged freeze candidate. That risk cannot fire while the client never asks. If this
hypothesis is right, a populated options body is precisely what would make it ask for
the first time, so succeeding at step one arms step two.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VUT92pz6RWKih9dSr8ZpxW
funman300
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