Hey everyone! Ed “SapMagic” Altorfer, the lead for Ranked, back again. Earlier this year, we detailed a broad set of updates to Ranked aimed at making your games more fair, your rank more accurate, and the grind less, well, grindy. A month ago, we ran you through additional changes we made based on your feedback, and now we want to take a moment to share next steps on position ranks and Ranked as a whole. In short, most of the Ranked changes have been well received and will go out as planned. You’ve given more feedback on position ranks, and we want to get it right, so we’re planning to run a handful of single-split, regional previews to get hands-on feedback from you before we roll it out everywhere.

Your Feedback So Far

Since Riot Pls and with each dev blog, we’ve been following the sentiment on the Ranked changes. We saw pretty much the same feedback from every region: You told us you felt good about most of the changes, like tiers, splits, rewards, and placements. At the same time, some of you were worried the benefits of position ranks, such as better matchmaking and a more accurate rank, could be outweighed by new abuse cases and compromised competitive integrity.

As a direct result of that feedback, we hauled position ranks back into the workshop and introduced focused changes that uphold competitive intent and curtail abuse cases. We feel good about the adjustments, but we know we’re going to need your hands-on feedback—something we can’t get before the start of the season.

So, What’s Happening?

We’re going to roll out position ranks in a way that lets us gather feedback before going broader to all players. This means a handful of regions will get a preview of position ranks for the first split. While the previews run, we’ll iterate based on your feedback. We’ll also track both single and position ranks so we can switch between them as needed.

We’re also going to release positional matchmaking and detection in Normal Draft in the next couple months. This will help us make any necessary adjustments and gain confidence it’s working as expected before we turn it on in Ranked queues.

The other Ranked features will go out to all regions later this year: a full rework of placements, a revamped season structure, new and evolving rewards, and two new tiers. We’re working now on solidifying our preseason plans and we’ll share more details soon.

Up Next

In the coming months, we’re going to break down the rest of Ranked for Season 2019 and introduce you to the team behind the changes. Next up is (still) tier and division changes, as well as placements. As always, thanks for taking the time to read these dev blogs and share your feedback—keep it coming!

Oh, and if you’re having a hard time remembering everything we’ve announced so far on Ranked for 2019, don’t worry. We have your back! Check out our other blogs below:

Post 1: /dev: Updates to Ranked for 2019

Post 2: What We Heard on Ranked 2019

Post 3: /dev: Addressing Your Feedback on Ranked for 2019

Post 4: /dev: Next Steps for Position Ranks in 2019