League players baffled after Riot says playing ranked is ‘pointless’

A tweet from the Riot support account has raised a few eyebrows after a player was told there was “no point” in playing ranked games during pre-season.

Pre-season is a unique time in League. With the drastic revamp Riot likes to do at the end of each season, Summoners Rift basically becomes a testing ground for a couple of months while the changes are fine-tuned, ready for the new season.

This year has seen huge changes made to items, with the introduction of mythics completely flipping how players select their build paths. After OCE jungler Guts tweeted Riot asking why his Ladder Point (LP) gains were so marginal, Riot explained the issue as being down to “changes that were made to the MMR system.”

When Guts followed up by asking why his LP losses were greater than his gains, Riot added that it would take a few games to reset, before asking him to “keep in mind that the ranked season ended a while ago, so [there’s] no point in playing ranked queues.”

League players baffled after Riot says playing ranked is ‘pointless’

Popular Twitch streamer Tarzaned, who has over 400,000 followers, responded with a tongue-in-cheek screenshot of his 50min+ queue time, while new Immortals support player Destinyy tweeted this ‘confused Nick Young’ meme in confusion over the comments:

While the season may be technically over, and players unable to earn awards like banners and skins, a lot of players prefer the competitive nature of ranked to normal games. It also means players are more likely to publicize unbalanced aspects of the game.

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Historically, teething issues tend to be widespread at this stage of the League calendar, given the huge number of changes made to the game. Riot has already released one hotfix to Amumu after the updated Bami’s cinder item meant he could solo baron at 20 minutes.

Traditionally, queueing up ranked in pre-season gives players the opportunity to boost their MMR, while also experimenting with new items, build paths and champions.

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Streamer Chaseshaco compared the tweet to the ‘200+ years’ tweet by Riot Lutzburg from January. In this controversy, Lutzburg disagreed with a player’s request to buff Wukong’s damage.

He then added: “Being good at playing a certain character in a video game is valuable, but I think I’ll take the 200+ collective years of professional game design experience.”

The issues surrounding reduced LP boosts could be addressed in patch 10.25, which is set to be released on December 9.