League of Legends Ranked Changes Detailed

League of Legends Ranked changes have been updated, according to a developer post from Cody "Riot Codebear" Germain, a Competitive Gameplay Production Lead from Riot Games.

This post comes after an initial announcement in February. In that original post, Germain introduced a series of goals for Ranked and Matchmaking across the board. They included improving upon the matchmaking algorithm, introducing rewards, making rank progression more satisfying for the players, and providing transparency about the new system throughout the process.

Additionally, the post touched on "game-ruining behavior" and the developer team response.

League of Legends Ranked Changes

Germain opens by revisiting the previous goals from February and explaining how things are progressing so far. He mentions the results of Autofill Parity and Swap, addressing a bug fix brought up by players with the latter, and states that imbalances regarding this part of the system have gone down from 11.4% to 5%.

Additionally, Premade Parity imbalance has gone down from 54% to 6% in accordance with the new system. Implementation of the new algorithm has allowed to the team to move into the next phase of the project: Ranked Account Seeding.

Also known as "New Account Seeding," Ranked Account Seeding (RAS) aims to further the effort of matching players with others of their appropriate skill level by affecting where players will be placed upon entering ranked play.

Previously, Riot had a system in place that dropped all players new to ranked at the same level, in the same place. It's obvious as to why caused problems—not every account that steps into a ranked match for the first time is at the same base skill level.

RAS will be "seeding players with gameplay information from other queues" to more accurately place players with others of their level. This will effectively end the imbalance in matches at the core.

Other highlights from the post include an improvement to the Player Feedback system, introduction of reporting and muting from the Champ Select screen. and the opening of Flex Queue.

For more information, check out Germain's post on the LoL website.