Wild Rift News October 13, 2022

Hot off the presses it's another Wild Rift News! We can’t believe we’re nearly halfway through 3.4! We hope you’re enjoying the festivities and goodies happening right now during our Power Spike Party! In this edition, we’ll be hearing from the matchmaking team about Legendary Queue, sharing details about the upcoming Supreme Cells event, and spotlighting you! Let's dive in.

LEGENDARY QUEUE

Hi everyone! Josh “Nextdoor” Menke here to talk about Legendary Queue! We’ve been excited to see that so many of you have been enjoying the new queue, and we wanted to give an update on how it’s going, talk about what’s coming next for the queue, and answer some of the questions we’ve heard over the course of the first season. 

As the queue currently stands, we are seeing the following percentages of players in each major rank, data captured early September, 2022:

This falls in line with our goals for how many players are in each rank in order to keep them competitive. Keep in mind that since everyone starts in Commander, those lower ranks will always have a larger number of players in them because they include players who we expect to get into the higher ranks that just haven’t played enough matches yet.

When the next season starts later this month, we will reset every player’s rank back to Commander IV again in order to provide everyone with the opportunity to once again prove they deserve their ranks. We won’t, however, reset MMR. This means that even if you go from Immortal to Commander, and all of your teammates are Commanders, the matchmaker will still make sure your teammates are all players with similar MMR and therefore skill to you as you make your climb once again.

In addition, to help players who had high ranks in the previous season climb, they will be given bonus LP gains in their earlier matches to help them climb more quickly.

Throughout the first season of Legendary Queue, we saw some commonly asked questions that we wanted to answer before you start your climb in Season 2: 

Many players are getting +55 for a win and -25 for a loss? Won’t that mean that most players will climb to the highest ranks eventually?

Players that get +55/-25 are those whose current rank is much lower than their target rank. Every player has a target rank that is based on how their Legendary queue MMR compares to the rest of the players in the Legendary Queue. Of course, this target rank will change as your skill changes. Remember, the Legendary Queue has its own, new, MMR, completely separate from the other queues, including ranked.

However, early in the season, everyone starts near the bottom and even below average players are well below their target rank. For example, a player that is currently Commander with a target rank of Guardian I will get a similar LP gain.

But once that player actually gets to Guardian I and their current rank is reflecting their current actual skill, that gain will change to +40/-40, which is back to the normal LP gains. If this player then gets past their target rank through luck instead of skill, and into, e.g. Vanquisher IV, they will net negative gains until they fall back into Guardian.

So far, the data show this is working very well, with players staying within the skill brackets that their gameplay supports they are best suited to.

I participated in Legendary Ranked in the early season and had a win rate that was lower than I expected. This doesn’t make sense to me, is matchmaking doing its job?

When the first season of Legendary Queue began, every player started with the same MMR and Rank. This meant that even some above average players started with quite low win percentages because they faced much better players in their initial matches. This happened because at first the matchmaker didn’t know who was good and who wasn't. 

As the season has progressed and the MMRs have settled, and ranks have spread out, you'll see less and less of this. It will also diminish quite a bit in future seasons since everyone’s MMR is already measured.

I made it to Legend early season, suddenly my EOG settlement changed drastically, is that normal?

Yes. Because we want the Legend rank of Legendary queue to retain the best players, we're constantly looking at what percentage of players are currently at each rank. We noticed early in the season that a larger than planned number of players were headed for the top rank (Legend) and made a change to bring that amount more in line with our original plan. A small number of players were able to pass their target ranks during this time and those players would notice their LP gains changing from primarily positive to net negative. This was to help them return to the target rank that accurately reflects their skill.

Why do some players climb at a lower win rate? 

As we mentioned above, there are a lot of ways a player’s win rate can fluctuate, especially early on in a new queue. At the start of a new queue, matchmaking is still learning everyone’s skill. This can sometimes result in a player losing a lot of matches early on. When this happens, the player’s MMR recovers quickly once the system realizes those were difficult matches, and the player will still climb. However, their raw win percentage will remain lower because of the unlucky start. With that said, winning the game is still the most important factor for the system to locate the proper skill bracket for players in the long term. 

In addition, recall that while we started everyone near the very bottom, most players will climb to the middle of the system which is closer to high-Guardian / low-Vanquisher. All but the very worst players in the Legendary queue will generally do at least some climbing early on. The Warrior rank isn’t meant to be a permanent rank for most players, but instead a place to temporarily fall into when needed. It also serves as a reminder that the queue is more competitive since you can start by going down and not only up. But generally, most players will climb at least a little bit and you will definitely see low win% players in at least, e.g. Commander III and even up into Guardian.

Why would I have teammates in Legendary Ranked that dropped to Emerald in Ranked? Shouldn’t they be kicked out of the queue?

The purpose of the Legendary queue itself is not to be elitist in and of itself. While we aim to have the best of the best players climb to the TOP of the queue, we still want to allow a wide swath of players access. The Diamond requirement is more to ensure players have had plenty of Wild Rift experience before entering the queue, and less about only allowing top players in. So as long as you can at least get to Diamond once this season, you can play in the Legendary queue.

That said, matchmaking is still done by MMR in addition to Rank, so you will generally only have teammates with a similar skill to your own, regardless of what they are or may have been in Ranked.

We have heard feedback that some players are not playing as seriously as expected for Legendary, and for that we're improving behavior detection systems and implementing new rules like the minimum champion mastery requirement that will be in effect in Season 7.

How do the new rules like minimum champion mastery work? What if I get autofilled as a jungle but I don’t have mastery on any junglers? What is the minimum mastery? 

We know one of the pain points for Legendary Queue was that in some games you would have teammates first timing a champion and it was extremely frustrating. In order to keep the queue competitive, we’re adding a gate which is based on your Champion Mastery Score. 

When it launches, the champion score required is initially going to be very low (you’ll just need a few games played). We intend to tune this system and didn’t want to be too restrictive right out of the gate.

So how does it work in Champ Select? You’ll always have access to EVERY champion you have enough mastery in, no matter what role you're assigned to. For example if you mainly play mid but get assigned support, all the mid lane champions you play and have mastery on like Lux, Morgana, Brand, Annie, etc will still be open.

To make sure players aren’t forced to play off-role picks by the system, we’ve implemented some protection. If you’re assigned to a role and have fewer than 3 champions available to pick who are tagged for that role with enough mastery, the system will stretch to additionally allow you to play your highest available mastery champions in that role. We implemented this so if for example an ADC main is autofilled jungle, we wanted to be sure they wouldn’t be forced to play their awesome MF as a jungler but would instead have something more suitable to play. 

Why can't we have the queue open for more hours? Why can't we have the queue open for fewer hours?

Our goal with the current hours was to try and find a window that was a good fit for each region. We wanted to make sure the queue was open during prime hours and avoid periods where there wouldn’t be enough players for quality matchmaking. Even higher-population regions struggle when it is 3-4 am local time.

For some regions, the window had to be large because they have a large amount of time zones, and it would be suboptimal to try and choose a time that had enough overlap for everyone in the region. It could even result in even less players available than intended because certain zones would just not show up at all, whereas at least today they may still be playing “one more game” even though it is late because they started earlier.

For other regions the window could be smaller since there are less time zones and a higher concentration of play hours.

This is an area we are still evaluating and we will tune available hours as needed for each region.

As a reminder, here are all the dates and times for the upcoming season of Legendary Queue:

Thank you for all your feedback, we hope you enjoy this season of Legendary Queue and are able to achieve all your goals!

SUPREME CELLS

We’re itching to start our training arcs, and on November 1, 00:01 UTC we’ll all be able to hop into the dojo! You’ll be able to pick your fighter and train them to grow stronger over the course of the event. You’ll also be able to progress and grow stronger, without playing games. This is our first time running an event like this, so let us know what you think once its live! 

After training in the dojo, you can put on your best martial arts garb and take your duels to the arena on the Rift with the new Supreme Cells skins! You’ll be able to earn one of our dojo masters, Supreme Cells Kennen as a login reward. There will be a pass that you can purchase for Wild Cores and after logging in for 7 days you’ll earn Supreme Cells Kennen and some other rewards! Supreme Cells Sett and Zed will be offered in chests that you can purchase for Wild Cores from the store. When each box is opened you’ll earn one of the following:

• Tier 2 Random Skin Chest
• Tier 3 Random Skin Chest
• Tier 4 Random Skin Chest
• Supreme Cells Skin Self Selection Chest
• 400 Poro Coins

There is also a guarantee that 1 out of every 10 pulls will always be a skin chest. We’ll be covering more details on this event and the chests in a Player Support article once the event is live! As we mentioned at the start of this year, we would be trying out various new ways for you to play through events and earn content. So, let us know what you think about this event!

DEV CORNER

During this patch we’ve had some videos with our devs where they’ve been discussing the content they’ve released onto the Rift this patch. Curious about the Support Quest items and why they grant you enchantment cooldowns rather than wards? Want to know more about bringing Gwen over to mobile? Or do you just really want to know what our devs go-to coffee order is? Whatever it is you’re itching to know, we’ve got you covered.

DEVS SPILL THE BEANS: SUPPORT ITEMS

Grab your favorite cup of coffee or tea and join game designer Sean “Zekramen” Mason as he talks about the Support Quest Items he designed for Wild Rift!

REPLAY: GWEN

Sit down with Maddy “Maddizzlee“ Wojdak and hear about how Gwen came to life in Wild Rift! We’ll also be releasing two other RePlay’s this patch about Supreme Cells and Vex!

https://www.instagram.com/tv/Cifjnc3Nrh4/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y%3D

WILD FOR WILDLINGS

CREATORS

Patch 3.4 has already brought some new items and champs to the Rift. With Vex and Warwick dropping soon, check out these creators to see what their building and how they're approaching this new patch.

Học Viện Tốc Chiến

Bractwo Rift

SkratiTv

FAN ART

We’ve been loving seeing all your fan art for the new content that we announced for this patch. Honestly seeing Sett use all his training from the dojo to do chores and help out honestly made us squeal.

PAINTOVERS

Some of your favorites are adorning their best ghoulish attire. But if Zombie Willump doesn’t give you a fright, we’ve also included some of the champions that reside in the Dragon Lane that still haunt our dreams for you to download.

That’s all for this edition of Wild Rift News! We hope you enjoy the rest of the Power Spike Party along with Vex and Warwicks releases! We’ll be back next month to talk about 3.5!