Congratulations! You can now officially participate in the 2016 ArtFight!
To get you started, here’s some how-tos!

How to get sorted:
Now that the event has officially started, you can click “Current Event” in the upper right hand corner to check it out. Once there, you can go ahead and get sorted into a team.
Team sorting is done manually to help prevent teams from being flooded with abandoned and inactive accounts. Which team you get sorted is mostly based on how many users are on the teams already, to help make sure that the user count is balanced and each team has an equal chance based on member count.
If you do not like the team you are sorted into, you can switch to Spectator and get sorted again. You are not guaranteed to be sorted into the other team because of this, but it is the best way to help ensure that no team’s population majorly outweighs the other’s.

How to attack:
Once you’ve been sorted into one of the two teams, you are then able to click the Submit button in the navbar and there should now be “Attack!”. To be able to attack someone, you’ll need to have their username and their character(s)’s ID. You can attack multiple characters at once with a single attack, if they’re in the image, but only one user will be informed that they’ve been attacked, so pick the user that you originally or mainly intended the attack for.
The owners of the other characters included in the attack will still receive the attack! It will show up on their character’s profile when they go to the Attacks tab.
You’ll also be asked to enter information about the level of completion of the attack, such as the main image detail, the background detail, any animation detail, etc. What you enter here will influence how many points your attack is originally worth, giving more points for attacks done with more effort.

What is rating?
Once the fight has started, you may notice a Rate Attacks option show up under Browse. Here, you can rate attacks that have been submitted, giving them a small addition to their points if you upvote them. You can only vote on each attack once a day.
This is not a required part of gameplay! It’s just if you want to take part in it.
You also do not need to be on a team to rate! Spectators, if you want to have a little part in the game too, now’s your chance!

What if I have extra characters on X site? / Can I accept new design attacks?
Due to the nature of how attacking works, people will be unable to “attack” your characters from other sites or do new design attacks on you. However, this does not mean that you need to upload everyone here to ArtFight or that new design attacks are impossible!
To allow people to do these kinds of attacks on you, you can upload a “general” character, or rather, it’s not a character at all. Title the new ‘character’ something along the lines of “Extras”, “New Design Attacks”, or the website(s) that you have your other characters listed on. Giving the ‘character’ a thumbnail/reference image for the site or purpose really helps too.
People can then direct any off-site character attacks, or new design attacks, towards this “general” character, where all of the attacks will then be collected into the Attacks tab that you can then sort through later.
A great example of this would be Russet’s Toyhou.se Characters.

Is friendly fire a thing?
It most definitely is a thing! You’d attack them just like you would anybody else, except your attack will not count for points.