/dev: Ranked Update Season One 2025

Hi everyone. Today we’re going to be talking about some changes coming to Ranked in 2025, and look back at our initial reasoning and clarification of some of the changes we made for Split 3 alongside some reflections on how they landed.

Ranked Resets

First and foremost, we heard your feedback around Ranked fatigue and the rate of resetting loud and clear. We know it felt like a constant grind, and made climbing feel less rewarding. Not to mention the fact that it led to higher levels of Ranked volatility which made the visible rank lobbies appear more imbalanced.

As a result, we’re making a couple changes in 2025. We’ll have one big reset at the start of the year without any additional resets after. We want your League climb to be enjoyable—not painful or daunting experiences when you need to focus on other aspects of life throughout the year.

We’ll also be changing the way you achieve Victorious skins. Previously, to earn the chroma-less version of Victorious skins, you had to achieve Gold with 80 SP, or grind out 1000 SP below Gold. In 2025 you’ll still be challenged to climb to get the corresponding chromas, but the requirement for the base skin will be to win 15 games of Ranked (solo/duo, flex, or a combination of the two) in each thematic Season. We want to reward you for your time in Ranked in each Season, as well as make the base Victorious skin more achievable.

And finally, for Apex players we’ll be soft-resetting MMR less aggressively. The current approach tends to lead to more early climb volatility. While this may make the climb to first Challenger a bit less exciting, we’re making this change based on your feedback that mixing Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger players early in the reset led to a lot of frustration. While that variance won’t be completely gone, we expect instances of it to be much less extreme than in the past.

But this is just one of the changes we’re working on getting out with Season 1 next year. Here’s a few other improvements we’ve been working on and will continue to refine moving forward.

The Return to Ranked Experience

In Split 3 we made some changes to increase the decay rate of accounts where players had taken a long break (6+ months). So if you were away from the game for a while and were previously Plat, you might be placed in Silver. While it can be discouraging to see that significant of a drop, we needed to make getting back into League a smoother experience so you have time to shake off that rust.

We did this because most players returning to Ranked after a long break were performing poorly across the board—which doesn’t make for the best experience for someone trying to get back into League. These players often experienced high 30% to low 40% win rates upon returning to the game, which isn’t fun for them or their teammates.

While the amount of early Ranked stability was mostly the same, there were more of the higher ranks in lower-ranked games, which was a change from previous seasons and led to some increased perceptions of Ranked instability (why are there ex-Masters in my Diamond game, for example). For a good number of these decayed accounts, we believe they’re in the right places for their current skill level. As an example, ex-Diamonds playing in Emerald are averaging a 48% win rate and the ex-Masters playing in Diamond are averaging a 49% win rate. While some subset of these accounts were still active on alts (meaning the players skill hasn’t decayed per say), these cases are much harder to account for.

Alt Accounts

Each split, we apply a soft MMR reset to higher tiers to give you a more fair chance to reach the top of the ladder by making everyone start from roughly the same place. Incidentally, it also does a good job of purging the ladder of ranked manipulated accounts. While we currently monitor rank manipulation with decent success, there are a lot of new accounts each season that are boosted or manipulated that these resets help address.

We care a lot about the return experience for players coming back to Ranked, but we felt that the methods we implemented last split caused too much collateral damage to matchmaking quality, especially around Diamond+. To make this better, we’re looking at finding ways to apply these adjustments more selectively, or in cases where there’s a high-likelihood that the player has been active on an alt account, tailor the adjustments to reduce the chance of decaying that account.

Rank Inflation

We also heard questions around why some of you experienced dramatic drops in your ranks in Split 3. Part of this is most likely due to the fact that we made the higher-tier ranks more difficult to attain, similar to previous seasons. We hadn’t taken a deep dive into our skill distributions in a while which led to some moderate rank inflation over the past few years. This led to a few issues, such as overcrowding of Master tier in some regions, drift of skill between the same rank in one region vs another, and devaluing of the higher ranks like Diamond which are meant to be more exclusive.

A challenging aspect of balancing ranks in League is the variance of what it means to be a given rank across different regions. For example, a player in Emerald in one region may have a very different match experience than an Emerald player elsewhere. We see this inconsistency create confusion and debate in community posts discussing tier game quality and experience. Because of the rank inflation, in some regions (especially larger ones) Emerald match quality was lower than others. This was due to the wide variance of skills of players in Emerald as well as Emerald being the top-end insertion point for alt accounts that performed very well in placements.

There’s no optimal time to adjust for rank inflation, but it’s something important for us to address. While it wasn’t a large swing, it was still large enough to be noticeable, especially when some players are dropping up to 6 divisions in placements. We’re going to keep a much closer eye on this moving forward to ensure that we’re not unintentionally allowing ranks to drift over time, creating the need for actions like this again.

Thanks for all your interest and engagement with Ranked. We’re looking forward to continuing to iterate on the system and make it a rewarding, fair and fun experience. Until next time!