Once we figured out how many tiers we were going to add, we went through a pretty exhaustive process in terms of figuring out what to name them.

The top tier was pretty straightforward—Grandmaster felt like a natural extension of Master. On the other hand, the lower tier was tricky because we had a few goals going in. First, we knew we wanted to put it below Bronze so it could be a starting point for new players. Second, we wanted it to be a metal to match the other tiers around it. Third, it had to be a name that would work for every language.

Wood is pretty iconic, especially in the west, but not really in a good way. Some players might think it’s funny to be Wood IV, but a lot of other players—especially new players—might end up feeling alienated, and we don’t want that. It also wasn’t a metal and raised concerns for a number of our other regions, so we decided to pick something a bit more… neutral.

After considering Wood, we narrowed down our search to Copper or Iron. The team felt both names were worthy of someone on a competitive journey, but in some languages the translation for copper is… well, unideal. For example, in Japanese, the translation sounds identical to “kappa” which is a creepy-looking demon/imp creature, and in Korean it sounds similar to another word that loosely means “this stinks.” On the other hand, Iron works out pretty well in every language, so we ended up going with that.