League of Legends Is Removing Division Promos from Ranked Next Season

Riot Games is making a big change to League of Legends' ranked system during the next season by removing the promo games players currently have to play when trying to advance to the next division. What this means is that if you're trying to get from Gold III to Gold II, you'll head straight into the higher division if you accumulate enough LP to roll you over to your new spot on the ranked ladder. The goal with this change, Riot said, is to remove "unnecessary frustration and climbing blocks" from the ranked experience.

The decision to remove the inter-division promo games in both the Ranked Solo and Ranked Flex queues was mentioned before in a past update from Riot, but it wasn't until this week that Riot confirmed the plans for the change.

"Inter-division promotion games were initially implemented to provide compelling goals for players to tackle between tier," Riot said. "At best, they were a source of relief when you won and, at worst a source of major frustration when you were bounced out for the fifth time in a row. We wanted to revisit the original decision and solve for unnecessary frustration and climbing blocks between solo and flex queues divisions. As such, at the start of preseason, we'll be removing the inter-division promotion series in both queues and making the following changes to avoid ranked inflation and rapid rubberbanding."

Huge info here for all of our ranked and matchmaking plans this preseason:
-Division promo removal
-Rank Informed Matchmaking
-Rank Seeding
-Duo removal in Master+
-Chromas for victorious above goldhttps://t.co/GsdjWwDug2

— Mark Yetter (@MarkYetter) September 17, 2020

In the new system, players won't have their LP start at 0 when they hit the next division. Whatever LP you had in excess will roll over to the next division to give you a head start in your next matches.

One of the downsides to this change is that the demotion protections currently in place between divisions will be removed. This means that if you just make your way into the next division and lose the next few games, there's a good chance you'll drop back to where you were before if you lose enough LP.

While the change will be present in the inter-division promos, the process of advancing to the next tier – Silver to Gold or Gold to Platinum, for example – isn't changing. Riot said these promo games between tiers provide players with a "meaningful and challenging endeavor," so they're going to stay.

The changes will be live on the PBE servers when the preseason period starts in a few weeks, but it'll be while before we see them come to live servers.