League of Legends: Wild Rift‘s Patch 2.5 that rolled out on Oct. 27 brought a handful of changes to the game’s ranked mode to make it faster and easier for players to find matches while maintaining a fair game—but most of them were reverted due to unexpected problems cropping up.
One of the major changes was ranked matchmaking scaling off of MMR instead of your in-game rank. The methodology here were that players of similar skill levels would be matched regardless of rank, but this caused some massive rank disparities in practice.
In a blog post, Riot explained that while the change seemed to have an overall positive effect, they’ve heard the feedback and will be rolling out a hotfix to amend the issue.
This change will see players only able to be matched against or with players around their current rank. For new players, this means up to Gold. But for those who already have a rank, you’ll be matched with players one rank above or below.
For those players who are at the top of the ranked ladder in Master or above, these changes being reverted will cause longer queue times. But it will ensure that you only are matched against similarly ranked players. You could still see players outside of your rank band in a match, but these cases will be rare and likely joined by that player’s butterfly badge for “playing above their rank.”
Along with these changes, today saw another hotfix to repair an issue with Rift Herald that was allowing players to finish games too quickly by using a pair of them. You can check out all the new changes in Patch 2.5a in the patch notes here.
