Do your ranked placement matches reset when a new season begins?

ViridianEight·4/14/2017, 3:15:50 PM·1 votes·7,619 views

When I first began playing league, I got a little bit ahead of myself after being at level 30 for a while and decided to play ranked - a terrible mistake. I now have 9 placement matches finished with 3 wins. Obviously not wanting to be placed in bronze 5 right off the bat, Im curious as to whether or not the placement matches will reset after the season ends. For example: If in season 7 i have 9 placement matches finished with 3 wins and dont get placed, when season 8 rolls around will my placement be reset to 0 matches 0 wins? Im curious as to whether I should push now or wait until season 8 as to not make myself look worse than I already am ;)

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5 Comments

Mysticman894/14/2017, 4:28:41 PM2 votes

It doesn't really matter in the long run for various reasons. The first one is of course that in the long run you'll end up where you belong regardless of where you start, so you can be a plat player who goes 0/10 due to exceptional bad luck and get placed bronze 5, and you'll climb back up quickly.

Secondly though, placement matches are just matches that have a higher than normal impact on your mmr, rather than super special matches where your W/L ratio for those matches solely determine your rank. You're placed based on your mmr at the end of placements, so depending on the particular MMR match ups, different matches can have more or less impact on your MMR, and hence your final rank.

If for example matchmaking totally broke, and a fresh account with a normal (silver ish) starting mmr got placed into a match against challengers (with challenger mmrs), they would lose almost no MMR for their loss (since the system expects them to lose), and even if that happened for 10 matches in a row they might still place silver 5 despite being 0-10. If matchmaking broke in the other direction and the fresh account was matched versus low bronze 5's, they could very well go 10-0 and place silver 3, and if they lost even 1 of them they might place bronze since they'd lose a lot of mmr from that one match.

So in your case, you started at whatever starting default MMR (~1200 or so which is silver 4 ish). You played 9 games that were probably relatively fair MMR wise, each which affected your mmr somewhat, so your current ranked MMR is gonna be 1200 - ~3 losses worth of mmr. If you don't play anymore this season, your MMR will stay there until the end of the season, but it'd still be hit by part of the soft reset going into next season, which generally tugs peoples MMRs down. You'd start the next season with your placement matches showing a fresh 0:0 record and you'd need to play 10 matches to finally be placed, but your starting MMR next season would be lower because the 9 games you played this season still impacted your MMR.

Basically, just play and do your best. If you are bronze level, so be it, theres no point in trying to avoid the system telling you so, and theres probably utility in learning to climb through bronze to actually improve more then playing in normals. Almost no one stays where they were placed unless they're really that level, so don't worry about being bronze now but worrying you'll be 'stuck' bronze later on once you're silver, since if you are at a silver level, you'll be able to climb there.

D3m37r14/14/2017, 3:31:07 PM1 votes

Yes, placement matches reset.

SenpaiGrendelFly4/14/2017, 3:56:47 PM1 votes

You really don't want to know how this works. Let's just say if you win 10/10 placements next season you won't rank above what you ended this season with. Have fun with the climb.

TheJakeinator4/14/2017, 4:14:46 PM1 votes

They reset but League will remember how you did in previous seasons and take that into account when ranking you