by RANKING UP
We knew we didn’t want to make substantial changes to Ranked and then just announce a new system right before the end of the season. Instead, we’re sharing our plans early so you can help us shape Ranked, and we’ll be updating you regularly throughout development.
Working through the problems above, we focused on four key things we thought Ranked should do:
Give clear feedback after each placement game.
Surface a diverse set of challenges throughout the season.
Provide regular milestones and meaningful goals regardless of skill level.
Reward deep and ongoing investment.
Matchmaking should be as fair as possible, period. We want the system to reward going deep on one position, but we also want to recognize hardcore players who choose to master several positions. To that end, we’re making some big changes to our matchmaker. Next season, Ranked Solo/Duo will be outfitted with positional matchmaking, which is a fancy way of saying we’ll find opponents for you based on your skill in the position you’re playing
MILESTONES AND GOALS
When we looked at our current arrangement of ranks, we found some of our tiers encompass a wide skill range or have too many players—most notably Bronze, Silver, and Diamond. This results in situations where some players go a long time without ever ranking up. We could solve this problem by shuffling players around within our current tiers, but we’d end up pushing them into the higher ranks. Instead, we thought this would be a good opportunity to add more thresholds where players could get positive feedback on their progress without diluting what ranks mean.
The current design adds two new tiers, and the addition of these tiers will help achieve two things. First, they’ll help us smooth out the bad experiences in Bronze, Silver, and Diamond. Second, they’ll bring more differentiation for Diamond players, which is something that has been a problem for a while now.
Since we’re adding two new tiers, we saw an opportunity to slightly compress the number of divisions, from five to four. The end result of these changes is a climb that emphasizes the high moments of hitting new tiers without exposing you to more division promotion series.
We knew we didn’t want to make substantial changes to Ranked and then just announce a new system right before the end of the season. Instead, we’re sharing our plans early so you can help us shape Ranked, and we’ll be updating you regularly throughout development.
Working through the problems above, we focused on four key things we thought Ranked should do:
Give clear feedback after each placement game.
Surface a diverse set of challenges throughout the season.
Provide regular milestones and meaningful goals regardless of skill level.
Reward deep and ongoing investment.
Matchmaking should be as fair as possible, period. We want the system to reward going deep on one position, but we also want to recognize hardcore players who choose to master several positions. To that end, we’re making some big changes to our matchmaker. Next season, Ranked Solo/Duo will be outfitted with positional matchmaking, which is a fancy way of saying we’ll find opponents for you based on your skill in the position you’re playing
MILESTONES AND GOALS
When we looked at our current arrangement of ranks, we found some of our tiers encompass a wide skill range or have too many players—most notably Bronze, Silver, and Diamond. This results in situations where some players go a long time without ever ranking up. We could solve this problem by shuffling players around within our current tiers, but we’d end up pushing them into the higher ranks. Instead, we thought this would be a good opportunity to add more thresholds where players could get positive feedback on their progress without diluting what ranks mean.
The current design adds two new tiers, and the addition of these tiers will help achieve two things. First, they’ll help us smooth out the bad experiences in Bronze, Silver, and Diamond. Second, they’ll bring more differentiation for Diamond players, which is something that has been a problem for a while now.
Since we’re adding two new tiers, we saw an opportunity to slightly compress the number of divisions, from five to four. The end result of these changes is a climb that emphasizes the high moments of hitting new tiers without exposing you to more division promotion series.
