From Season 9 to 10

The 10th League of Legends ranked season started only one month ago, so the data might differ in the following months as more summoners will play their placement matches, but so far there have been several changes in the ranked distribution.

The average rank moved from Gold IV to Silver II-III.

Gold isn’t anymore the most populated rank as it contains “only” 21% of the players (down from 33%). Now, Silver holds the crown with 37%.

In the previous season, about 15% of the player base was ranked at Bronze and below, while now the number of people at lower ranks doubled to 32%.

The changes affected also the higher area of the matchmaking that saw Platinum and Diamond reduced to a half, from 15% to 6.4% and from 3.6% to 2%, respectively.

The population at Master also decreased, but, on the other hand, there are now more summoners both at GrandMaster and Challenger.

Distribution:

Iron: 8.1%

Bronze: 24%

Silver: 37%

Gold: 21%

Platinum: 6.4%

Diamond: 2.0%

Master: 0.017%

GrandMaster: 0.050%

Challenger: 0.028%

New player experience, normal games, MMR

In December, RiotIAmWalrus, Ranked and Clash designer at Riot Games, shared a few info on the new player experience and on the ranked system. I have quoted his words:

Why new players face Gold opponents

Not every new player is below average. Some are well above average, some are well below, but we’re still operating with limited information in all those cases. Starting people too low means that above average new players create disruptions in the system for a longer period of time.

Our goal is to keep the individual matches feeling fair for both the new player and the experienced teammates they eventually get.

Normal vs ranked games

Results in Normals don’t necessarily correlate 100% to results in Ranked.

People don’t always have the same competitive intent in Normal mode, so a player of average skill who tries hard may be slightly above average in normals, while a player of above average skill who messes around may end up below average.

Then, when those two players go into Ranked and start both trying hard, their Normal MMR wouldn’t actually reflect their relative skill.

Rank and Skill Rating

In general, we match on skill rating, not rank, because skill rating matching creates matches that play more fairly, even if they sometimes LOOK less fair.

Let’s hypothetically say you are a player with Platinum skill, playing in Gold II. If we match you against Gold Is in your promos, you will have a much greater likelihood of winning, because we honestly think you’re better than that - but this also means we’ve made a game where 5 players are heavily disadvantaged.

Instead, we try to make a game we think is fair for you based on skill rating, and then let your LP move more quickly for each win, in order to get your rank and skill caught up.

MMR vs LP

MMR is meant to measure your skill, and that is all it’s meant to care about. This means that we want it to be able to adapt quickly, be fine with overestimating, and move around quickly as we get new info.

LP is meant to be more steady and certain, so it moves slower and is less responsive to small trends. This is why it takes more games for your LP to move upwards and sometimes catch up with your MMR - it’s effectively waiting for a larger sample size.

We don’t take KDA, Vision Score, etc. into account for MMR, because those statistics are gameable. We don’t want to create a situation where your support decides their odds of winning the game are too low, so they instead focus on maxing out Vision score to save as much MMR/LP as possible.

Season 9

November 2019