League of Legends Devs Address Concerns Over Ranked Changes

The team behind League of Legends have announced some pretty big changes coming to Ranked in the future, but not all players were happy about it. From the loss of a Division, to positional matchmaking - there was a lot of "new" being addressed, prompting player concern to become very vocal. Some wondered if this would promote more toxicity, while others shared their concerns over becoming "too grindy." Because of this, Riot Games has decided to lay it all out there and address these worries head on.

"One of the big questions we heard was, "Who's asking for changes to Ranked?" We embarked on this journey because we saw a bunch of long-time Ranked players had started to burn out," began their latest blog post. "That makes a lot of sense given they're doing the same thing over and over again for the same result. And it makes even more sense when you consider that our last major update to Ranked was more than two years ago when we added Position Select."

"Whether it's a champion update or a big system like Ranked, we try to stay focused on what makes that thing fun and special. Then, we try to look at those essential elements from as many angles as possible. Are players telling us there are parts of it that suck? Is it under-serving players it should be serving? Is it driving a certain way to play that makes League less fun overall?

In the case of Ranked, it's really a combination of all of these. New tiers and placements are aimed at fixing obvious problems, and other changes are aiming to better serve players of all skill levels and add fresh ways for you to challenge yourself in Ranked."

As far as the concern over "being too grindy," they mentioned that though it will "feel" like players will have to play twice as much to rank up multiple positions, they are tailoring it to where that won't be the case. In fact, they straight up said, "flat out you won't need to play double the games to hit your peak rank."

"Match quality and competitive intent are critical because they keep Ranked legitimate," explained Riot Games when another player stated they were worried that the changes will promote 'less serious' players. "We've explored a number of solutions already, but your feedback reinforces this concern. We need rock solid fixes before moving forward."

Regarding whether the matchmaking aspect will be abused or not, the developers admitted that this was a cause of concern for them as well. Because of that, extra attention to detail was applied throughout the pitching of change ideas. "Specifically, there are two major cases we need to handle. First, we're worried that players could queue up for an off-position and swap in champion select for favorable matchmaking. Second, some players could take that a step further by queueing up with a duo partner and consistently swapping positions.

I want to be direct: we believe in position ranks as a part of the overall changes to Ranked because if we get them right, they could help refresh the game's challenges. We're in the middle of finalizing our plans to solve or mitigate these abuse cases into non-issues, but if we don't believe we can, we won't ship position ranks as part of Season 2019. Period."

Riot promises that a new update is on the way that will be targeting even more player concerns. They even mentioned that they'll reiterate this same message over and over again if it would put players at ease over what's next. For now, we'll have to wait and see what else they have in store, but it looks like the team is hyper-aware of the complaints and are doing all they can to address them head-on.