The 2024 season of League of Legends has begun, which of course means players’ ranks have been reset. Season 14’s reset was particularly rough, though, and it’s something even Riot Games acknowledges.
In a Jan. 10 post on X (formerly Twitter), lead gameplay designer Matt Leung-Harrison did his best to explain the reasoning behind the reset, describing it as an unfortunate side effect of players not being demoted enough during the previous season.
“We start of season resetted [closer] to where your MMR should put you,” Leung-Harrison said. In case you’re new to League of Legends, MMR stands for matchmaking rating and is a hidden value that determines your skill level and thus what sort of players you’ll be matched against. “Because of the thing I mentioned last week, where we were not demoting people often enough (especially from tier boundaries like E4, P4, etc.), there were many cases where a player was Emerald with Gold MMR or Plat with Silver MMR, etc.,” he continued.
Leung-Harrison offered an apology, saying, “It’s our bad for allowing these “inflated” situations last season in the first place,” but assured fans Riot will do its best to avoid such resets for the rest of the season. As a reminder, 2024 marks the first season to be split into three segments, with the first split expected to run for roughly four months.
Unsurprisingly, some players aren’t particularly thrilled about this and responded to Leung-Harrison’s post with frustration, such as BlurstTewiter: “Ah yes when the end of last split was chain losses because Riot’s shit EOMM system gave me a team mate who would go 0/12 over and over it’s my fault.”
Others, like Trace, asked Riot to simply let players see their MMR: “If we are going to that length how about we just make your true MMR visible? At least for Masters+ if you want the casual player base to not get their feelings hurt.”
Not everyone reacted so negatively, though. Plenty of players appreciate the transparency and think this change is for the better. In a Reddit thread discussing Leung-Harrison’s post, gubigubi called it “a great move… Hopefully I don’t see any Emerald and Platinum players in my bronze and silver games while I’m trying to climb. Entirely made me not play ranked in 2023.”
Alex_Wizard argued, “It’s exactly what needed to be done and said. Rip the band-aid off, communicate with the community, and hopefully take some lessons learned moving forward.” Leung-Harrison himself chimed in to further justify the decision: “People will be demoting from tier boundaries more this season as we made promoting easier. Frankly it was pretty off that a player would be playing with Silvers, while they have Plat rank. or Gold with Emerald rank, etc.”
