League of Legends' 2018 Ranked Season Begins Soon

The next ranked season of League of Legends is scheduled to begin soon with everyone's rank being soft reset to once again climb to the top.

Those who competed in and climbed the ranked ladder last year will be familiar with the format, but for those players who recently joined the League community during the preseason, you'll have to play 10 placement matches in order to find your rank. Your rank will depend on your existing MMR as well as your individual performance in each of your 10 games, so while winning is the quickest way to the top, doing well on a personal level will help improve your rank as well.

Playing 10 games in a row is quite the time investment in League, and with the ranked format being quite a bit more stressful for some players as opposed to the normal queues, it's a smart idea to space them out to avoid a disheartening losing streak. And once you climb your way up to the Challenger tier like we know everyone will, some changes are being made to the solo and duo queue system.

"In Challenger tier, we're removing the solo-only restriction in Ranked Solo/Duo," Riot Cactopus wrote in the 2018 season announcement. "We saw that Challenger players were facing Master tier duos pretty regularly, which ends up making the queue less competitive overall (despite the original intention back in 2016), and also punishes duos on the upper echelons of Master for winning too hard. We'll be monitoring how much this impacts the health of the queue over the coming weeks."

The Honor system is also resetting during the start of the season. Players will be reset to the Honor levels detailed here, and Honor system will be tied to receiving your ranked rewards as well. Players will have to be at least Honor level 2 in order to get their ranked rewards, a relatively low requirement for the Honor system. The tournament system, Clash, will also be locked behind an Honor level 2 requirement. Players will also be able to earn Hextech chests for each champion that they obtain an S- score or higher on in every game.

The 2018 ranked season begins on Jan. 16, so get all the practice in that you can before moving into the placement matches.