Riot Games has revealed the first Victorious skin, the mid-season end date, and more.
This year, the rules of ranked games have changed somewhat. Previously, splits were insignificant periods dividing the season into 3 parts, but now they have entered a much higher level.
The ranking season has been divided into two parts. The first one ends soon, and players can claim an interesting skin from the Victorious series for it. Until when do they have time to pocket the rank and what rewards await them?
Victorious Anivia
The main producer of the game series, Riot Auberaun, has announced the developers’ plans for the currently ongoing ranking season. This one will end soon, and players will have their ranks reset – as was usually the case at the end of the season:
- Promotion Series from best of 5 to best of 3: We wanted to let promotion series resolve more quickly, which this change accomplished. We liked what this did, so coming up they’ll be resolving even faster, maybe even instantly. Riot Revenancer has the details below.
- Removing visible rank influence in matchmaking: We still believe this was the right move for returning players (basically anyone not playing a bunch of games at season start), but have heard you on the pain of more smurfs in your games. We knowingly made the tradeoff of more smurfs in regular games for the returning player experience with this change, but definitely aren’t happy with the current impact of smurfing.
- Victorious Skin and New Rewards Track: We’ve still got some time to go, so we don’t have an official take on how these have landed yet. More free rewards are good though, right? I’d also like to officially announce that the Victorious Skin for Season 2023 – Split 1 will be Victorious Anivia.
That’s not all, as in the second splice the developers want to add a new rank, which Wild Rift players are probably very familiar with.
It’s important to us that the highest ranks retain the exclusivity and prestige they’ve historically had, so we’re NOT changing anything about how those ranks are distributed. That said, flattening the curve without compensating somehow would result in significant inflation in Diamond. In order to mitigate this we’re adding a new rank: Emerald, which you may recognize from League of Legends: Wild Rift. Emerald rank will live between Diamond and Platinum and represents a roughly similar percentage of players as Platinum does today.
In addition to this, the player’s placement system will change. Until now, in order to get the rank from which you started the season, you had to play 10 placement matches. Starting with the 2nd split, it will be only 5 matches. In addition, Riot is completely removing the series of games for promotion.
Promotion series have long been a divisive element of the ranked climb. Promotion Series were meant to add drama and stakes to import moments in your League Career. While they certainly did this, they also created situations where players would bounce off them multiple times, stalling their climb and creating frustration. After looking at how frequently players are likely to be playing them with more climbing and two splits in a year, we’ve decided that the stress of repeatedly running through promotion series for ranks you may have earned before outweighs the benefits of having that significant series of games.
The first ranking split will end on July 17 according to server time. Ranked games will be playable again starting July 19.