Posted BY NEW001 on Xbox Wire
Riot Pls is our ongoing effort to share our vision for League of Legends and to keep players in the loop as to what’s going on back at Riot HQ.
Hey everyone,
New001 here—lead producer on League of Legends—for the ranked edition of Riot Pls.
Dynamic queue is still failing to meet many of your needs. More specifically, it’s undermined competitive integrity at the highest levels of play. It’s taken us too long to get here and we apologize for the delay.
Let’s get straight to it:
TL;DR: For players near the top of the ladder, we’re bringing back solo queue and making a number of other changes focused on competitive integrity. For 2017, we’re developing a new ranked experience that offers legitimate competitive standings for all types of players. We’ll have details on the 2017 features in late September—you can read on for the short-term changes planned.
We’re focused on the top first because that’s where the 2016 ranked season changes have caused the most pain, and where we believe we can take immediate action to address player feedback. Accurate standings are critical when determining the top of the ladder, and we’re committed to addressing that with the following changes:
- Challenger tier will shift to pure solo, and Diamond and Master tiers to solo/duo. We’re making this change first at Diamond / Master / Challenger because even minor levels of premade coordination have disproportionate effects on match quality at the highest tiers of ranked, given the limitations of the player pool and the sometimes massive skill disparities between single divisions.
- We’re tightening the decay rules in Challenger and Master tier to encourage healthier competition at the highest level of play.
- We want to raise the bar on how we recognize players who hit the top of the ladder at the end of the competitive season, so we’re working on new physical rewards for Challenger (more details coming soon).
- We’re adding an autofill ‘grace period’ for all players and a guarantee that you’ll never be autofilled during a promotion series. Autofill is essential for ensuring shorter queue times during off-peak hours, but it can be pretty obnoxious if it happens back-to-back (this generally only happened at Master+).
These changes should serve as meaningful steps in the right direction, but we’ll be listening closely for your feedback. They will roll out over the next few patches and will carry forward next season as well.
We’re also currently closing in on our final designs for the 2017 Ranked experience, with the commitment to designing a system that provides legitimate standings for players of all competitive types. It’s clear we made too many trade-offs this year on the Ranked experience, but we think we’re now on a better track. Details are still being finalized, and we’ll have more in September, along with a reveal of our end of season rewards.
Finally, while we’ve heard some comments suggesting otherwise, it’s never been a goal for us to make League more casual. We believe League is for hardcore gamers, and mistakenly believed we could offer real competition to all parties with the same experience. Our long-term vision is to be a global sport, and our goal remains the same: to offer competitive experiences for all players, from solo competition to focused, competitive teamplay. Many things are a further ways out, but that’s where we’re headed.
We’re committed to continuing to improve League for you. Thanks for sticking with us.
