TFT Ranked - What are we doing for Set 2 Rise of the Elements?
Hey Tacticians!
With Rise of the Elements now out in the wild, and our first patch coming to a close, we wanted to highlight what you should expect from the next Teamfight Tactics ranked split when it kicks back off this week on patch 9.23. There’s three main things we wanted to cover:
- We'll be hard resetting everyone’s **rank **down to Iron.
- We'll be soft resetting everyone’s MMR.
- Never losing LP for coming 4th
**Why a hard rank reset? **
For many of you, we know that progressing through the ladder as you master a game can be an incredibly satisfying period of time. We want to see if we can offer that entirely fresh ranked experience each time we release a new set. Given that we’ve introduced almost entirely new champions, spells, and strategies, we feel now is a good time to go for a big change, and gather feedback from players to see how it feels to inform future set releases. It’s worth noting that during placements - the first 5 ranked games you play on 9.23, you will not lose any LP regardless of how low you place so the sky's the limit if you win all 5!
Why a soft MMR reset?
While everyone kicking off their ranked split from the same rank is exciting, we still want the games at the start of the season to feel competitive and fair. We don't want someone totally new to ranked ending up in a game with all of you former challenger players, just like we don't want a challenger player finding themselves in a lobby with a bunch of players in Iron (and me). Since we’d changed SO much about the game however, we went with a soft reset to reflect the learning process we are all going through while maintaining the competitive nature of the queue. That being said, players who were high MMR in Set 1 can expect that they’ll progress through the ranks faster than those who were lower MMR. While we want your first games to be competitive, we also didn’t want it to feel like you were punished for doing well during set 1.
Never losing LP for coming 4th
One clear pain point from Set 1 that many of you brought to our attention was that it felt really bad to place 4th in a game, thinking you “won”, only to end up losing LP. These instances were rare, but when they happened they really felt shitty, so we wanted to make some improvements. In set 2, 4th place will now never result in an LP loss, but 5th place always will. We hope that this makes games where you make it to the top 4 feel more exciting, helps change the mindset that the only way to win is to come 1st, and it allows us to add some additional in game ceremony to help recognize your placement.
We’re super excited to watch you figure out the new strategies available in Rise of the Elements over the coming months! Please continue to give us feedback, it helped us build Rise of the Elements knowing confidently that we were moving in the right direction. You can read up on some of the other larger changes we've made here.
