Boards›Announcements

Riot Pls: Ranked Pls

Riot·8/24/2016, 5:31:18 PM·17 votes·61,552 views

Riot Pls is our ongoing effort to share our vision for League of Legends and to keep players in the loop as to what’s going on back at Riot HQ.

Hey everyone,

New001 here—lead producer on League of Legends—for the ranked edition of Riot Pls.

Dynamic queue is still failing to meet many of your needs. More specifically, it’s undermined competitive integrity at the highest levels of play. It’s taken us too long to get here and we apologize for the delay.

Let’s get straight to it:

TL;DR: For players near the top of the ladder, we’re bringing back solo queue and making a number of other changes focused on competitive integrity. For 2017, we’re developing a new ranked experience that offers legitimate competitive standings for all types of players. We’ll have details on the 2017 features in late September—you can read on for the short-term changes planned.

We’re focused on the top first because that’s where the 2016 ranked season changes have caused the most pain, and where we believe we can take immediate action to address player feedback. Accurate standings are critical when determining the top of the ladder, and we’re committed to addressing that with the following changes:

  • Challenger tier will shift to pure solo, and Diamond and Master tiers to solo/duo. We’re making this change first at Diamond / Master / Challenger because even minor levels of premade coordination have disproportionate effects on match quality at the highest tiers of ranked, given the limitations of the player pool and the sometimes massive skill disparities between single divisions.

  • We’re tightening the decay rules in Challenger and Master tier to encourage healthier competition at the highest level of play.

  • We want to raise the bar on how we recognize players who hit the top of the ladder at the end of the competitive season, so we’re working on new physical rewards for Challenger (more details coming soon).

  • We’re adding an autofill ‘grace period’ for all players and a guarantee that you’ll never be autofilled during a promotion series. Autofill is essential for ensuring shorter queue times during off-peak hours, but it can be pretty obnoxious if it happens back-to-back (this generally only happened at Master+).

These changes should serve as meaningful steps in the right direction, but we’ll be listening closely for your feedback. They will roll out over the next few patches and will carry forward next season as well.

We’re also currently closing in on our final designs for the 2017 Ranked experience, with the commitment to designing a system that provides legitimate standings for players of all competitive types. It’s clear we made too many trade-offs this year on the Ranked experience, but we think we’re now on a better track. Details are still being finalized, and we’ll have more in September, along with a reveal of our end of season rewards.

Finally, while we’ve heard some comments suggesting otherwise, it’s never been a goal for us to make League more casual. We believe League is for hardcore gamers, and mistakenly believed we could offer real competition to all parties with the same experience. Our long-term vision is to be a global sport, and our goal remains the same: to offer competitive experiences for all players, from solo competition to focused, competitive teamplay. Many things are a further ways out, but that’s where we’re headed.

We’re committed to continuing to improve League for you. Thanks for sticking with us.

- New001

633 Comments

Merlin the Wise8/24/2016, 6:43:35 PM488 votes

I have come to the conclusion that too high of a majority of the people who play ranked games at bronze-silver and I am sure, even sometimes gold elo do not actually differentiate between Ranked and Unranked games. In other words, they play ranked games with little to no care or effort, when they should leave that mindset in aarams or even unranked ques.

There needs to be a better system of punishment for players who are intentionally and obviously (consistently) not putting forth effort in ranked games. I am talking about players who not only feed, but also players who have obviously given up well before a game would end. Do not neglect lower elos, because I can tell you from personal experience that the lower the elo the worse this problem is - which makes climbing a living nightmare Nocturne

Why should players who are trying their damndest in any elo be penalized for players who type in chat "gg" at 10 minutes after giving away 4 kills?

I don't understand why I need to lose lp because of these people.

Ty

A Normal Kitty8/24/2016, 8:24:37 PM73 votes

Their is so many issues with how ranked works now, and I get this is the easy immediate fix. But rito pls... Gold and below holds 90% of your ranked player base.... Plat holds the other 5-7%. All I keep seeing is "oh we want it to make it a legacy past time esport." The first of its kind. The issues with doing that is that

  1. If you spurn your casual crowd you are done. This is a fact. Look at TF2, Halo 2 (RIP), even something like Soccer. The game isn't balanced and maintained around the top tier of the crowd. Its balanced and sold to the everyday joe. The person who can put time and work into it if they want to but don't have to spend everyday playing to enjoy it.

  2. Neglecting 90% of your player base seems like an odd business model. You can say that its hard to balance or design a system at the lower levels since players are unpredictable, inconsistent, and a great deal more populated. That being said it doesn't mean you can just enact a one size fits all system that works for the higher tiers/elo and not for the lower and expect the average player to want to play.

  3. Yes, its a competitive game; by nature its a team vs scenario. That being said the issue of sandbox mode comes up again. The simple fact of the matter is that many people in lower elos will practice something new in the ranked system which eventually leads to feeding, flaming, and reporting. Give people a way to draw simple equivalents to real time sports and other games that have aged extremely gracefully.

  4. Community. Community. Community. Community. All of my friends who got me into playing this game have since quit. All of them. The only one friend I have left who plays I got in and we play together. They quit for a combination of all the things I've already talked about but it goes so much further. Quite simply it just lost interest for them. And what was I to do to convince them to play a game they didn't want to. The amount of rewards for playing with friends is pitiful. "Oh, but wait. There's dynamic queue where you and your friends can get the rewarding experience of going up the ladder together." Yes very good point [insert rioter here]. Wait a second they got their diamond friends to smurf into a pre-made 4-man dynamic in ranked. Yeah thats a fun game to play. There's toxic players running rampant and the "honor" system has been thrown to the wayside. On top of that this games entry level is impossible. Between ruins, smurfs, and masteries still being on an archaic and arbitrary level system. This game is impossible to get into as a new player. Ruins are useless before tier 3. At tier 3 they cost the equivalent of 4 champions.

The not so simple TL:DR is that your infrastructure of the game needs to be changed. You are still set up almost exactly like you were 4 years ago. The player base has changed, and from what your public announcements are saying your mission has changed too. If you want the game to last into a legacy status situation then a lot of the things that you started with need to be eliminated or severely reworked. And for the love of god change your mindset about the average joe since they are the whales that fund your micro-transactions.

I love the game. I really do. I've been playing for countless hours over the past 4 years. I would love to see this become a past down esport. But it just doesn't seem like the game is being designed by people who actually play the game. It seems like you are taking a very small specific play group in mind when you make every situation and blanketing it over the large majority after that. I honestly hope I get a riot response to this because I'm desperately just trying to understand what the game plan is here. From an outside view looking in, it seems like these actions are quite contradictory to the mission statement put forth.

EndlessSorcerer8/24/2016, 6:32:37 PM43 votes

If access to solo/duo queue isn't motivation to climb to Diamond, I don't know what is.

lightdragoon888/24/2016, 6:28:10 PM20 votes

For players near the top of the ladder, we’re bringing back solo queue

Forever Bronze item 3070

....not that I play rank anyway.