More updates coming to matchmaking

Tl;dr - We are reverting most of the matchmaking changes from October 27, meaning players will go back to seeing closer-ranked teams in their lobbies.

As we announced in the Patch 2.5 Preview, we rolled out some changes to Wild Rift’s matchmaking system aimed at addressing some key issues in Ranked, namely ensuring that players in lower and higher skill can find matches in a reasonable amount of time without a noticeable impact to match quality and fairness.

WHAT CHANGED?

We switched from using a combination of rank and MMR (Matchmaking Rating) to purely MMR as our guide for how we put matches together. As a reminder, we see MMR as how we expect you to perform, informed by your wins and losses, and Rank is a reward on how you actually did. While connected, these systems do not scale directly with each other. For instance, a highly-skilled player fresh out of placements can be Silver II, but so can an average-skill player with 1000 matches under their belt. These players will have the same rank, but not the same MMR.

WHAT HAPPENED?

All in all, we saw these changes had the intended effect, with no large impact to match fairness and ensuring that more players found matches early in their climb, as well as at high ranks—but these successes came at a pretty meaningful cost.

As many of you noticed, matches had far more visible gaps in rank, both within and between teams, leading to many players wondering: why is my team so… spread out?

We heard you loud and clear: using only MMR has lowered your confidence that we’re matching you with and against players of similar skill, so we’re planning to revert most of these matchmaking changes in an upcoming hotfix. We do think the changes to lower-ranked games have been positive, and to ensure that our freshly-graduated newbies can find a game in a reasonable time, we'll continue to allow them to match up to Gold-level games.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR MATCHMAKING?

• We'll be tightening back up most of the restrictions on what rank gaps are allowed in and between teams. For most players, this will feel the same as it did before the change above.
• For players just starting Ranked, we're keeping the “expanded” window for Iron and Bronze players, who still may need to be placed with Gold players in order to find a game at all.
• For players in higher-skill matches (Master and above), you may see a small increase to queue times, but you’ll go back to seeing high-ranking players in your games.

On rare occasions, you may see a player or two outside these ranked bands, but we feel that the downside of never matching, particularly early in the Ranked climb, is worth the occasional tradeoff of finding yourself in a disparately-ranked lobby. We’re keeping the “playing above their rank” butterfly(?) badge for these cases.

While we’re not calling this experiment a failure overall, we do recognize that we missed the mark on giving you confidence in match fairness in Wild Rift. We hope this change feels better, and GLHF in your games!