/dev: Patch 2.4 Ranked Updates

Hi! I’m Josh “Nextdoor” Menke, a game designer on Wild Rift’s engagement team. There are some major updates coming to Ranked play in Patch 2.4, so the team and I would like to share how we came to these decisions.

WHY ARE PROMOTION MATCHES BEING REMOVED?

We recently announced plans to remove Promotion Matches for Season 3. After comparing the competitive intent of Promotion Matches against engagement and skill data, we found that they were doing more harm than good for players. In the lower ranks, we saw that promotion losses were more likely than usual to cause players to give up the ranked climb. Our assumption is that players value Promotion Matches more than regular matches, so losing a Promotion Match feels extra bad and discourages further playing.

In higher ranks, we saw promotion wins causing players to stop playing ranked more often than would be expected. We suspect high-ranked players feel that after overcoming a difficult barrier, they worry about falling back into Emerald and having to replay their Promotion Matches. By removing them, we can encourage players to keep playing after making it into Diamond knowing that if they fall out, they are just a few wins away from getting back in.

Overall, we feel Promotion Matches in Wild Rift are currently at the point where they are causing more disruption and frustration than they are helping. We will continue monitoring the overall competitive integrity and engagement quality of Ranked. We generally judge competitive integrity on how well the visible ranks are lining up with actual player skill and performance in our data. We don’t anticipate observing any discrepancies with the new changes, but if we do, we will find solutions to keep the ranking experience engaging and competitive.

- Riot Nextdoor, Principal Game Designer

WHY ARE THERE ONLY 3 BANS INSTEAD OF 5?

Hello, Ed “MartianSpider” Knapp here, lead game designer for Around Game on Wild Rift. I want to talk to you about the long awaited introduction of bans to the Ranked queue!

We believe the best version of a competitive league includes bans, preferably 10 bans. However, with the current set of champions released, we worry that with 10 total bans, the result could be a majority of players’ favorite champions would be banned out, and many matches would feel “same-y.” We talked about releasing bans earlier, with either 1 or 2 bans per team, but we knew this would be frustrating as a minority of players in the game would have access to bans. We know from experience that this leads to an increase of toxicity in matches and we didn’t want anyone to experience that. This is why we landed on 3 bans. Now, most players each match will have a shot banning out their least favorite opponent or the OP champion they don’t want to play against. We plan to introduce 10 bans total per match as soon as the champion pool is large enough to support it!

We made a couple of other changes to support bans too. We changed the champion ownership requirement to access Ranked. Now, players must own 16 champions, including free-to-play rotation champions, in order to queue for Ranked. This is to ensure that there is never a match which fails because a player is banned out. We considered just increasing the champ requirement to 16 without free-to-play, but this would leave some ranked players without access to Ranked after the patch hit, and we didn’t want to leave anyone out in the cold.

We are super excited to get bans out there for you, so let us know what you think!

- Riot MartianSpider, Lead Game Designer

WHAT ELSE IS CHANGING?

We want to simplify the presentation of ranked rules. Currently, Fortitude’s display isn’t giving players a clear indication of whether their Ranked Loss Shield is active or not. Our updated end-of-game screen should remedy this. Other optimizations like, lining up the diamond sockets from left to right, makes things easier to track progress at a glance! 

We are also making a small polish change to how LP gains work from Diamond and up to be more smooth and consistent throughout the season.

That’s all from us for now. We are eager to hear your thoughts on these changes and look forward to chatting with you soon. In the meantime, good luck on your ranked climb in Season 3!