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Position ranks and split rewards coming to PBE today for 9.2!

RiotRiot SapMagic·1/9/2019, 10:56:23 PM·1 votes·135,946 views

TL;DR: Position ranks and rewards are rolling out to PBE today for Patch 9.2. This week we’re testing the season reset and next week we’ll test that we can revert position ranks without losing your progress if necessary.

Hey everyone, Ed “SapMagic” Altorfer here on behalf of the Ranked team. Today, we’re rolling out position ranks to PBE, so I want to give you a rundown on what you can expect leading up to season start. I covered the other Ranked changes on PBE in a previous post, so feel free to check that out.

#Wait, you’re making changes to Ranked? Yes! Back in April, we laid out our plan to overhaul Ranked, which includes clear feedback during placements, better matchmaking, more accurate ranks, milestones and meaningful goals regardless of skill, and new rewards for deep and ongoing engagement.

If you want a quick (or...not so quick) refresher on our previous posts, check out the links below!

Post 1: High-level goals and overview Post 2: Summarizing your initial feedback Post 3: Addressing feedback and adjustments to position ranks Post 4: Laying out our plan to do regional previews of position ranks Post 5: Talking about new tiers and placements Post 6: Discussing how the top of the ladder is affected Post 7: Outlining the three-split season and new split rewards Post 8: Answering more questions on rewards

https://i.imgur.com/Rzfb8zR.png[] #Position Ranks Position ranks is all about giving you a matchmaking rating and rank that matches your skill in each position you play so we can put you into more fair games no matter which one you queue up for.

With position ranks, there’s no overall rank, so you’ll get LP each game for the position you played. Some of that LP will splash into all your other positions since if you’re climbing in one, some of that skill is transferable.

https://i.imgur.com/dODarTs.png[] #Placements For position ranks, all the changes we made to placements still apply. That means you’ll play placements for each position you want to rank up and you’ll receive a provisional rank after one game. You’ll need to play eight games total in a position to unlock its rank, with Autofill games counting toward placements for the position you played.

https://i.imgur.com/yPx6oIz.png[] #Rewards We’re also testing split rewards on PBE. You’ll earn points toward rewards every time you win a game and you’ll unlock rewards as soon as you have enough points. For Split 1, here are the rewards you can earn:

  • Summoner Icon - 150pts You earn a split-themed icon designed to be worn alongside your Ranked Armor.
  • Ranked Armor Upgrade - 250pts You earn a visual upgrade to your Ranked Armor that dynamically matches your tier and lasts for the rest of the season.
  • Dynamic Emote - 500pts You earn a split-themed emote that dynamically matches your tier. We’re still working on making it update when you rank up, so look for that a little later this cycle.

#Position Ranks Switch Since we’re planning to preview position ranks in a couple regions at season start, we will be tracking both position ranks and current ranks. That way, if there are any issues, technical or otherwise, we can switch everyone over as soon as possible without you losing any progress.

To make sure that switch is working as intended, we’ll be testing it next week. That means, at some point your position ranks will be hidden and we’ll display your legacy rank. We’ll make another post before we test that functionality.

#Give us your feedback! Because there are fewer players on PBE and most don’t play regularly, it’s tough to test legitimacy or matchmaking quality. As a result, you probably shouldn’t expect the high stakes climb you’re used to on live.

We still need your help testing everything going live today though, so please jump in and play some games. Let us know what bugs you find and feel free to share your thoughts on any of the changes, whether it’s about system rules, UI, or art.

Thanks in advance for all the help making sure this is a stable and awesome experience, and as always, we’ll see you on the Rift!

Edit: As of today, we're testing the position ranks switch, so position ranks is currently set to off. It looks like it worked well, but we did discover a few edge cases we want to fix in case we have to use this functionality on live. Thanks for hanging in there and we will re-enable position ranks after we have done some more testing.

84 Comments

Brezzerious1/10/2019, 12:41:03 AM19 votes

As a master-diamond player and a player since season 3 I find positions ranks will just bring more problems than the actual ones that they intend to fix . In my opinion having a overall a rank is a core piece of league and dividing it in 5 just feels weird climbing with specific roles.

Honestly u guys say that feedback is important but actually I don't see it happening . https://nexus.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/2018/06/dev-addressing-your-feedback-on-ranked-for-2019/ . As u can see in that link the comments show clearly that the feedback about this change is not positive it even has a comment made by a rioter with 179 downvotes. I can´t find the link of a post in reddit about this but I can remember it was not really positive aswell. U guys can go just through all posts mentioned above that feedback is always the same (negative).

It is actually the first time I post some feedback on the forums since I started playing cause I find this a really heavy game change to the ranked system that will actually take alot of players to start quiting slowly.

Im not gonna go in depth about this cause there is already player's feedback in the threads/posts that they are supposed to give feedback, so please listen to the community.

Thanks in advance !

Cosnirak1/11/2019, 12:50:55 PM7 votes

These new ranked rewards are really crappy. Summoner icons are essentially worthless if they aren't your favorite icon atm (and I suspect most people will never consider any such icons worth displaying), ranked armor is worth about the same or maybe even less, and an emote that just displays your current tier is only very slightly better than an icon or just as worthless if you have enough other emotes you'd rather use (which I suspect will be most people who have that many other emotes period).

I would trade all of these rewards for each of these tiers of ranked points giving me just 1 RP a piece instead. Yes 3 RP a season > these rewards, it's not even a remotely close call for me. Honestly I'd rather you just not even make these rewards if they're going to be so bad and put the time and effort of the Riot employees that would go into them into nearly anything else that improves the player experience instead.

I'm generally a fan of you at least trying out this new position rank system as I think it could turn out good (though I also definitely have my doubts). And yet these rewards are so bad that I feel compelled to reiterate this point even further. That you would even propose them is a little insulting. You can do so much better than this.

Dr Rick Report1/12/2019, 5:19:06 PM6 votes

"We aspire to be the most player focused company in the world" - Riot Game back then

What has happened to this guys? I went thru all of the posts that were strictly about the positional ranking (including this post on the boards) and what I saw is nothing but pure negativity towards the idea. 1-2 positive comment next to 10s if not 100s of negative ones. Either you need to give glasses to the person who said that we like the idea or you need to fire that person altogether.

I'm sorry, but if this change goes live, a lot of people will most likely quit playing ranked (or League altogether), including me. Riot made a ton of bad stuff over the years to help cover the other bad ideas instead of removing/fixing them. You tried to make role picking reasonable with autofill instead of removing the feature. (which is fine, probably even better this way) The balance folks ruined the smart part of the game by taking away everything related to vision (pinks revealing stealth, green smite, sightstone, etc.) just because esports wasn't good enough. I'm basically the second support as a jungler, I should be getting autofill protection for every single game I play as jungle.

But this update is different. Ranked with these updates was bad, but still playable. But when this goes live on EUNE, the amount of people who int autofill games (which you don't take care of, since the report system is a pile of trash for anything other than chat) will at least double.

You asked for the opinion of the community, you got replies from every region indicating that they don't want it (including NA which has a lot less inters compared to EU), so please man up and say that okay guys, this was a bad idea, we're scrapping it. Please!

angelskies1/10/2019, 12:05:15 PM5 votes

Many problems to this system. Eg. what if a plat mid lane decides to troll whenever he is support because it wont change the fact that he is still going to be plat anyways, last chance, please dont change the system

Sad and Alone1/12/2019, 7:38:15 AM4 votes

Wish you guys weren't so hellbent on shoving this down our throats when so much of the community has made it clear we don't want this.

Chriser511/16/2019, 9:44:12 PM3 votes

Guys, this isnt supposed to "fix problems" where there are none.

This is supposed to give players the opportunity to play ranked on different roles without giving them anxiety that they will feed hard on a role they arent used to playing.

This is a good thing if the abuse is kept to a minimum and i really love these changes.

fire2631/10/2019, 10:06:10 PM3 votes

I really don't like this, and judging by a lot of the comments many people don't either. The problem with having a system like this is that many people sometimes want to change their roles or even get autofilled only to do really good and want to play that role a bit more. If people wish to change roles, they have to go through an entire grind all over again in order to get to their regular rank. This type of change will kind of force you into having to play your main role even if at a certain time you do not wish to play that role. For example, long ago back in season 7 when the tank meta was strong (before conqueror) and my main assassins couldn't do much in this said tank meta, I was playing a lot of sejuani jungle despite being a mid main. If this system is implemented, theres not much point in trying to climb with sejuani as my rank won't really be affected and I would have to play a whole lot of sejuani in order to get where I want to be. I'm not high elo, so I don't have decay problems, but thinking about those people who are meta abusers and change roles quite frequently based on meta won't really be able to climb due to decay in the roles they aren't playing while a certain meta is going on. Those players will also have a rough time, and I don't think these changes will really help anyone. Theres also the fact that when you get autofilled, you really don't have any incentive to not troll considering that it won't affect your main rank. So I'm asking to please not add the position ranks, everything else is a great change except for this one.

Xeronic1/15/2019, 6:56:12 AM3 votes

Please don't do this. There are far more people that don't want this than people that do.

Small Boobs Ahri1/9/2019, 11:28:51 PM2 votes

will it be a different MMR by role or will we have almost the same one everywhere?

TDT hasu1/10/2019, 5:39:23 AM2 votes

I think you could think off better rewards. Even chests or keys are better than icons and emotes they are already in level system.

Jheff1/10/2019, 10:09:23 AM2 votes

So about this role swap. I just wondered how the rank gap between duos would be calculated. Last season if I was plat i couldn't queue with silver players. But say I would get Plat as Support and Silver in any other role. I could queue as Jungle with a player that wanted to play, say, mid (as primary/main role) having a Silver rank. Then we could queue without a rank gap. In champ select i could then swap to Support and we both would play our desired roles.

Now I know it has been stated, that frequent swapping would result in a matchmaking closer to my best rank. So at some point, I'd get to play a Plat game no matter if I'm silver in all other roles except one. But I would still be able to play with that one person if i chose a silver rank in the lobby? How does this affect the other persons game? Would their rank affect the game, would their role still be taken into account? And if so, would i win less LP, and they more?

loli nukes1/9/2019, 11:06:11 PM2 votes

how does this interact with role swaps in champ select? Thanks for the post <3. will be testing!

Sangy1/10/2019, 2:37:57 PM2 votes

Since you can now rank in multiple roles can challenger players now get into challenger 5 times with each role or is only their highest rank shown?

Lucian Was Taken1/9/2019, 11:33:43 PM2 votes

How much points do you get after every win, is it the same amount as LP or is it a whole diffrent system

Selec1/9/2019, 11:35:20 PM1 votes

I'm just gonna expose my case so you can take your own thoughts.

I've been playing mid since forever, but I rerolled to ADC this season because that was my innate most comfortable role. But when you're playing ADC, the way you play the game is way different than playing other roles. You're playing like in "ticks", you adapt yourself to those ticks which represents your attack speed and your moments of doing damage and your moments of position yourself. No need to talk about kiting and priorize autoattacking over skills, so I'm now much more accurate using autottacks, but less using skills.

When I get filled in Mid, I'll be facing an opponent that is used to use skills, to think about the value of those skills more properly than I do, and he's not playing with the "ticks" mindset that I'm playing with.

That's gonna result in a huge disadvantage against them.

Of course we don't know the exact difference between your "filled" rank and your "main" rank. Let's suppose ie you're Platinum 1 with ADC and Platinum 5 with the filled roles.

I'd find myself having a hard time playing against a Platinum 5 "main" midlaner if I'm getting filled.

And I'm considering a role that I played a lot, if I get into jungler, a role that I never liked, the difference would be much higher.

AnataBakka1/10/2019, 12:50:37 PM1 votes

You earn a visual upgrade to your Ranked Armor that dynamically matches your tier and lasts for the rest of the season.

So you can get these upgrades at all elos? I.e can you have a visible gold upgrade, plat upgrade, and diamond upgrade at the end of the season?

multi color armor?

Larriet1/10/2019, 12:30:57 AM1 votes

Dynamic Emote - 500pts You earn a split-themed emote that dynamically matches your tier. We’re still working on making it update when you rank up, so look for that a little later this cycle.

Even while the Emote is dynamic, once the split ends, it will be finished, right? And then there will be a new emote for the next split?