The 2016 ranked season kicks off soon

Gather up your teammates and get your gear ready, because on January 20 we’re opening up the 2016 ranked season! Missed the preseason updates? You’ve got a few days to catch up on the latest and prepare for a whole new year of GGs. Check out some highlights below:

As usual, you'll have ten placement games to fight through before settling in to your tier and division, ready for the climb. Your placement is still heavily influenced by where you ended up last season and what you accomplished during preseason. If you’ve never played ranked, then your placements will be all that matters!

Preseason brought some substantial changes to the game (learn more about preseason here, so we’re again running a soft reset before placements kick off. As with previous years because of the soft reset, you’ll likely place lower than where you ended last year.

Now each player chooses two positions (or fill!) before queueing up to find a team. We’ve also replaced the solo/duo queue with a dynamic group queue, where you'll be able to climb the ladder with any number of teammates. You'll still need to be of similar rank to your queue-buddies, and we designed the system so groups will almost always play against similarly grouped opponents. We’re watching this very closely, but we’re confident this change makes it easier to compete with friends of similar skill levels and better emphasizes the team nature of League.

Check out more on new champ select and dynamic groups at the Season 2016 update.

Promo Helper means when you're in a division lower than Gold 1, if you lose a promotional series, the next time you enter your series, you'll start with at least one win.

We're also optimizing high-level matchmaking to identify epically skilled players faster and widen the MMR range for finding games at the pinnacle of amateur competition.

Learn more about Promo Helper and high MMR adjustments here.

This year we’re exploring new possibilities for ranked rewards, but we don’t have anything ready to share just yet.

That’s it for now! Learn more about ranked play here, and we’ll have more updates as the season develops, but for now, get practicing, because the 2016 Season begins next week on January 20!