League devs reveal plan for massive ranked MMR changes in Season 2024

League dev RiotIksar revealed Riot’s plans for a full backend overhaul over the course of Season 2024, with an immediate change being made to kick off 2024 and another system being implemented later in the year to combat players getting stuck in ELO hell.

League of Legends players making smurf accounts has long been a standard thing for high-level players to do once they hit a certain rank and want to practice new characters or roles, and it’s become a fairly common thing in all multiplayer games over the years.

However, even League players who are at a generally low rank have begun making smurfs to evade “ELO hell”, a zone where you gain very little LP for winning and lose a ton upon losing a match. +18/-30 would mean winning two games and losing one would net you 6 LP total, making the climb nearly impossible.

League dev RiotIksar has revealed their plans to implement an entirely different system that’ll switch up the way MMR is calculated and make it much more difficult to get stuck in ELO hell.

League dev announces massive ranked MMR changes in 2024

Making the ranked climb feel satisfying and worthwhile is never easy when it comes to a competitive multiplayer game like League of Legends. The reality of the ladder is that only so many players can climb to the top, and the lower ranks being populated is a necessary part of the process.

However, many players who complained about being hardstuck have gone on to make smurfs and climb quickly due to them being able to take advantage of having a fresh account that gains more LP and ultimately evading the system for MMR settling that’s been confirmed to exist.

To quell players’ frustrations and try to cut down on people feeling as if they can’t get anywhere, RiotIksar laid out the team’s plans for multiple MMR system overhauls that’ll be rolling out in 2024.

Riot Games

“We’re moving to a different proprietary (riot-made) system at the start of the new year (ish) and then tentatively planning on moving to a new system later in the year called trueskill 2. We’re still evaluating on trueskill for now but it sounds promising,” Iksar explained.

The details behind the proprietary Riot system are still up in the air, but Riot wants to improve things in the short term and believe that making a quick adjustment here will be better than what’s currently in the game.

As for trueskill 2, it’s a skill rating system created by Microsoft & its first party studios for the more recent Halo and Gears of War titles. The way it functions is entirely too complicated to explain in short terms, but just know it was built around being scalable for team-oriented games that have to pair players of varying skill in a balanced lobby.

However, it determines that skill rating partially by things like KDA and other stats. It’s hard to say how well those stats would scale to League of Legends considering certain roles or champion picks don’t do well statistically even if they win games. Picking Galio mid as a frontliner in a role oriented around damage and KDA comes to mind as a possible outlier that could tank a player’s rating even if they’re winning games, for instance.

As a result, Riot’s undecided as to whether or not implementing it is ultimately a good idea.

“trueskill 2 would take a long time to integrate if we end up deciding to do it — don’t want to wait that long to make improvements,” Iksar said. They went on to explain some of what Riot’s system aims to improve, even if we aren’t too sure how it’ll actually work.

“We’ll share more info when we have it — there are already some changes in place for the start of the new split that should help put new accounts at an appropriate ranked placement — and also some other changes that should make getting into a negative LP state much more difficult (think -30, +20),” claimed Iksar. “We’ll have to see what actually happens in practice, though — I suspect there will be many adjustments/corrections/bugfixes over the course of the year. I am confident we’ll be in a better spot regardless.”

Backend changes are never the most flashy thing ever, but they’re often a necessary part of making the experience of playing smoother for everyone. It remains to be seen if Riot’s new system is an improvement over the old one.