Changes coming to high-skill Ranked play

TL;DR: We’re adjusting several aspects of high-skill ranked and matchmaking to address fairness concerns you’ve shared with us—and we’ve seen in our data—over the past few weeks. These are only intended as temporary fixes until we can address the issues more broadly in a future patch (likely Patch 3.2). Some of these will roll out today, some next week. 

WHAT’S UP WITH RANKED?

Recently many of you, especially high-skill players, have told us that Ranked just isn’t living up to your expectations. From your feedback we know that some of the major pain points have been: being put into lopsided games; receiving low VP gains and large VP losses when you're on a hot streak in low Diamond; and feeling the pressure of playing in a premade team to climb the ranks. We know our competitive queue hasn't been delivering lately, and we're rolling out some short term fixes to address some of these frustrations.

We thought we’d mention one thing upfront that we wanted to be more explicit about: When playing with a team of 5, in 100% of cases you will face another group of 5. This is intentional, as in some ways playing League as a group is almost a different game to the solo experience!

A few months ago, we rolled out some changes to matchmaking to allow full premade teams to more easily find games. We were seeing situations where queue times would roll over into 10-minute (and sometimes much longer) waits, which we think is unacceptable for Wild Rift, given its short game length. Overall we think that playing with a full team competitively is one of the best ways to play League, and we want to enable teams to do that. But what started happening over time is that players felt forced to play together in order to climb the ladder, and some found ways to “beat” the matchmaker into granting more VP in each game. Neither of these are healthy for Wild Rift or players.

SO, WHAT’S CHANGING?

So we’re making some changes to help improve the solo experience at higher levels of Ranked play. Some of these will be obvious, others more subtle. A few of these are effective immediately, and many will be added next week.

(Feb 24) Expanding Diamond and Master tier 

Why? To make the experience of climbing smoother, and to provide more teammates and opponents for your games, we’re increasing the population of Diamond tier and Master tier. This will initially result in large VP gains if you’re at or near this rank, but these may level off as you reach higher tiers. 

(March 1) Capping VP losses in Diamond

Why? To eliminate the “+10/-15 VP” issue in Diamond IV, we’re reducing the amount of lost VP on defeats. If you’re earning +10 VP for a win, you should now only go -10 VP on a loss.

(March 1) Doubling the weekly cap of Ranked Fortitude

Why? We want to give players on their way to Diamond more ways to progress, and to increase the effectiveness of the above changes. 

(March 1) Various premade team algorithm changes

Why? To make games fairer, we’re tightening the maximum allowed average skill gap between both teams and reducing the allowed rank gaps for forming a premade party at higher tiers. As a side effect, this will increase queue times significantly for high-ranked premade players, but we felt this was a tradeoff worth making in the short term so solo warriors don’t feel pressured into grouping up.

A BALANCING ACT

It’s important to remember that there’s no “fix” for matchmaking. Our algorithm has to constantly balance keeping queue times short, maintaining fair games, and giving you the freedom to select a position of your choice. Every change we make will impact at least one of these aspects, and finding the right balance needs to work for all players, not just a specific skill group. 

A feature many of you requested is to simply restrict premade teams from playing at certain ranks. This was actually our first choice to solve this issue, at least temporarily! Unfortunately, in order to do this at specific ranks (and not just for, well, everyone), we’d need to release a full patch with a new app store download, so we opted to make the changes above until we can address the issue more broadly. 

And on that note, it’s extremely important to note that these are just temporary fixes; we’re hoping to implement a more permanent solution in Patch 3.2. To ensure that teams who want to play together competitively can still do so, we will likely not restrict premade teams outright, but instead alter their VP gains. Longer term, we are looking at the competitive experiences offered by our Ranked queue and we’re still assessing if a split queue system may serve different types of players better.

We truly appreciate your patience and feedback as we work through these tradeoffs, and if you’ve been frustrated with Ranked recently, we hope the changes we’re making improve your overall experience.