League of Legends‘ new ranked season is almost here—and players can expect a few changes.
Gameplay design director Mark “Scruffy” Yetter discussed the upcoming season’s ranked system in today’s dev blog, explaining that LP gains and losses will be “slightly smaller on average.”
“We’re planning to do a smaller ranked reset at the start of the season so you stay closer to the rank you’ve achieved this year, and removing divisional promotion series makes people climb faster, and benefit more from a win streak,” Scruffy said. “In order for the ranking system to stay accurate, we needed to tone back the amount of LP gained per win.”
The Riot dev went on to explain that a smaller ranked reset and no divisional promo games would inflate players’ ranks. To ensure the ranking system is stable and precise, players’ LP will increase and decrease at smaller increments.
Many players began reporting extremely low LP gains and drastic losses after Riot made some “internal changes to the ranked system” in Patch 10.24. Riot’s Support Twitter explained that the “weird LP gains… should normalize” after playing a few games.
And Scruffy asserts that the “necessary tuning and fixes” were made so that everything will be correct for January’s season reset. Even though it’s the preseason, players can still climb the ladder and increase their MMR to receive better placements when the ranked season turns on.
League‘s season 11 kicks off in January 2021, offering the removal of inter-division promo games, ranked-informed matchmaking, and more accurate ranked seeding for smurfs.
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