Riot has decided to make some massive changes to the ranked system.
LoL: Huge Ranked Changes Coming 2024
As Matty Love Gaming revealed in his video, Riot has posted an announcement on their official Chinese website, regarding huge changes to the LoL ranked system starting 2024.
Riot will be making the biggest change ever to the League of Legends yearly structure by not only be changing the split system, but will also be adding rewards to incentivize players to play more ranked.
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Stick around to find out what those changes exactly entail!
LoL: What's Being Changed In The Ranked System
Riot has announced that the current ranked season will be extended into December and afterward they will change the ranked system, so players can play ranked all year round. Instead of the usual ten months ranked playability, with a two-month break, Riot wants to give players the chance to play ranked all year round, since some players only enjoy playing ranked, and no other game modes.
In order to keep things interesting for players, ranked will go from a two-part to a three-part split, with each split being four months long.
Riot claims that they're making these changes to keep all players engaged in the game, since many speedrun through ranked, only to drop it after a short while and then pick it up again after the split.
With this change, Riot adds that there won't be players that played the preseason and have an initial advantage against other ranked players that decided to take a break from LoL ranked. All players will be given the chance to start ranked at the same time, and Riot hopes to even the playing field by doing so.
Additionally, this change is being made since players that played the preseason previously, tended to lose interest in ranked quicker than those that didn't play the preseason.
It has been already been noted by Riot, that they are aware of the risk that this changes holds, since the preseason, which has always been important for balancing gameplay changes, will no longer exist in the same way it did before. They've said they have already identified the biggest risks before making this decision.
These changes also mean that there will be three Victorious skins that can be obtained each year, instead of only two, as was previously the case. Another free skin per year sounds kind of nice, if you ask me.
New Ranked Split Dates
Riot has already revealed when the ranked splits will occur in the future. Since they're prolonging the current season, the next season will immediately start with the new changes that Riot wants to implement.
Along with the extended season, the current qualifying segment will be stretched out into January, until the next season starts.
Ranked system changes will drop at the same time as patch 14.1 along with the new gameplay changes, on January 9, 2024. This means the stages will look like this:
- Stage 1: starts on January 9
- Stage 2: starts in May
- Stage 3: starts in September
For those of you that are looking forward to the preseason gameplay changes, they will drop onto the PBE on November 20, 2023.
We'll have to wait to see whether this turns out to be a genius idea on Riot's part, or if ranked will go up in flames due to all the chaos that ensues.