Update on Preseason Ranked

It’s been a fast-moving week of launches, placements, fixes, and re-launches, so we wanted to take a sec and update you on what’s been going down.

First, sorry for the really weird week of Ranked. We knew something was up with Ranked Flex when we saw Diamonds landing in Bronze and Silvers in Plat, though it took us a few days to sort exactly what. We’re more confident in matchmaking quality after Monday’s downtime, but there’s still some loose ends that need to be tied off.

TL;DR: Because we crossed some wires with matchmaking (seriously, Diamonds in Bronze!), your placement was probably inaccurate and match quality wasn’t very good. We’ve rolled everyone’s MMR back to its last-known accurate state (the start of preseason), and anyone who has completed placements will need to play one more game to get re-placed.

To clarify, this is not a do-or-die placement match. It’s basically just fetching you a ranking based on your updated, not-wrong MMR. Whether this placement is higher or lower, it should be a more accurate reflection of where you’ll start your 2017 climb.

Your win/loss record remains intact, and will still factor into how you climb during preseason.

There’s one outstanding bug where if you’ve never played a ranked game of any kind on an account before, there’s a chance that you will be seeded at Bronze V no matter how your placements go. This is being fixed in 6.23, and is unlikely to affect many people, but just wanted to give you a heads up.

We’re gonna see some bumpiness as if this was the first day of preseason, but if matchmaking feels totally amiss after that, let us know -- we’ll be keeping a close eye on things. As a reminder, there will be a (much) softer reset and new placements at the beginning of the season in December.

For the curious, here’s a timeline of exactly what happened:

November 8: Ranked Flex launches globally

November 10: A number of issues crop up:

• Some players’ MMR is (obviously incorrectly) set to literally zero, meaning that matchmaking has no hope of accurately making matches for them and their placement was guaranteed to be Bronze V
• Some high-skill players lost a lot of MMR, further disrupting matchmaking quality
• A number of low-skill players are bumped upward in MMR, again ensuring severe mismatches in matchmaking
• The targets for each rank tier and division are recalculated to incorrect values as a result of the above, resulting in many players seeding too high or too low.

November 12: After two days of isolating the problems, we launched a fix aimed at solving all of the above issues. We immediately started receiving more player reports of poor matchmaking with crazy skill disparities. It was clear within hours that the fix introduced as many problems as it solved.

November 14: With a better vetted and more substantial fix ready to go, we took down Ranked Flex to implement wider changes to matchmaking. After standing it back up, issues seemed resolved and matches proved fairer across the board. We know some of you have considerably dropped, and we’re sorry for that too - but we made the call to make this reset now to avoid a situation where players get incorrectly placed at the start of the season. This prevents you landing in more unbalanced matches and unfairly climbing or dropping based on which team has more Fakers.