Wild Rift /dev: Ranked v1.0

Hey folks, Ed “MartianSpider” Knapp here. I’m one of the game designers on the Wild Rift team, and today I’m gonna be talking about our V1 feature set for the game’s ranked mode and some of the decisions we made along the way. Wild Rift is built on the legacy and strengths of League of Legends, but we also recognize and want to incorporate the different needs and perspectives of mobile MOBA players.

WAIT, HOW DOES RANKED WORK?

If you need a refresher, check out the most recent /dev diary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fV73FM1QBkA#t=1m09s

If you can’t watch right now, the basics are these:

• Same tiers as League PC, Iron through Challenger...
• … but with a new tier, Emerald (between Platinum and Diamond) for broader skill distribution.
• Win a game, earn a Ranked Mark. Lose a game, lose one.
• You'll need to earn a certain number of Marks to climb each division, with lower tiers requiring fewer.
• Progression at diamond and above switches to Victory Points, which should feel similar to League PC’s League Points (LP).
• Below Diamond, playing games fills up Ranked Fortitude, which rewards you for skilled play, and protects you from occasional losses.
• You can queue with 1, 2, 3 or 5 players, and you’ll always get balanced matchups, taking into account player skill and premade group size.

Our goals for Ranked are to make the game more welcoming to the next generation of League players, reduce player pain that would otherwise be amplified on our new platforms, make it easier to play ranked with friends, and better suit the needs of a brand new game.

WHAT’S NOT CHANGING?

We want to retain an authentic League of Legends experience on mobile/console and create a competitive experience that’s worth your time:

• We want to hold competitive integrity to the highest standard
• We want those leap-out-of-your-chair-and-fist-pump League high moments
• We want you to have the most memorable League experiences possible

We’ve heard your feedback on the features coming to Ranked, and want to respond to a few of those questions today!

DRAFTING, CHAMP BANS, AND POSITION SELECT

New players may be surprised to see that our ranked offering starts out with a draft mode, right from the very first game. We feel strongly that this sets expectations of what ranked play is in Wild Rift, and also provides a more consistently competitive experience throughout your ranked climb.

Instead of position select, we’ve optimized our matchmaker to build teams with as wide a mix of preferred positions as possible. Behind the scenes, it’s constantly looking at where you play, and putting teams of different preferred positions together. We think getting into the game quickly is super important for Wild Rift, but if the matchmaking system isn’t performing up to snuff, we will make changes to hit the position and champion agency you expect.

Wild Rift’s Ranked mode doesn’t currently have bans; we made this decision because the game’s champion pool is too small to be able to properly support a fun and competitive ranked experience when teams can ban out champions. You can expect to see bans in a later season when we’ve added more champs!

RANKED MARKS

Wild Rift uses Ranked Marks to measure your progress. They’re a super simple visual metaphor for ranking up, they give you a great sense of where you are on your ranked journey, and they may look familiar to genre veterans. Importantly, Ranked Marks also help focus on your individual progress as opposed to your position on a ladder. We hope Marks make each win feel like an individual accomplishment and allow players to easily set specific goals like, “I need to get 3 more wins to rank up.”

When reaching the higher tiers, though, we’ve seen that players DO want that ranked leaderboard experience. This is why we transition players at Diamond and above over to the Victory Point (VP) system, where the difference of 51.23% win rate and 51.26% win rate really can make all the difference. We’ll talk more about high tier Ranked later. I could write an entire article about that part specifically. Maybe I will anyway!

SINGLE QUEUE AND TRIOS

Our inboxes are filled with passionate questions from players regarding the party sizes in Ranked, and we get it. Hell, we’ve had experiences that don’t respect the inherent advantage that premade groups have in competitive queues. We want to do better here.

Regarding having a single ranked queue (vs Solo/Duo and Flex, for example): as mobile is a unique platform for local social play, we want to remove barriers for you to play with your friends IRL. We never want any player to think “I would play with my new friend in the lunch room but I don’t want to waste my time in a secondary queue.” Because of this, all of Wild Rift’s ranked play happens in one queue, with a single progression track per season.

“But Riot,” you might say, “this doesn’t seem fair for solo players!” This is really important to us. Our solution: while solo, duo, trio, and full team all have the same entry point, we actually matchmake teams differently behind the scenes.

Firstly, full teams will always be matched against other teams of five. Secondly, with mixed team sizes our algorithm is optimized to match teams with equal power. This means that in the majority of cases teams will have the same comp, so: 1-1-1-1-1 vs 1-1-1-1-1; 2-2-1 vs 2-2-1; 3-2 vs 3-2; and so on. In the extremely rare cases where this won’t work, we’ll be increasing the challenge for larger premade groups so they play against higher skill rated players. We hope that with all of these features combined we’re still keeping it fair on all you solo warriors and off-meta five-stack squads.

CONCLUSION

Wow, that was a lot! We hope you are as excited about Wild Rift Ranked as we are. You probably still have some reservations, and we wanna hear those too. The Regional Closed Beta is giving us a lot of useful info about how well our systems are currently working, but we’re still just at an early stage. As we continue development, we wanna work together to make Wild Rift your favorite ranked experience out there. Let us know what you think!

Read more about Wild Rift’s Ranked system here.