Riot address League preseason 11 ranked issues after player backlash

While you can’t earn much for playing ranked in preseason, many League of Legends players still do to get high quality games. This was lost on Riot originally, but they’ve addressed the LP gain problem in a new statement, vowing to make changes ahead of Season 11.

Ranked play in preseason isn’t awfully popular in League of Legends. However, it’s often the best place to get a competitive game to test out the new features. In Season 11, that has been incredibly crucial with testing the new item rework.

However, Riot sent players for a loop when a support representative said playing ranked was practically “pointless.” This led to the community being both confused and outraged for Riot basically saying ‘stop playing the game.’

The point was lost in translation though. Lead gameplay designer Mark Yetter clarified Riot are introducing some changes to LP gains in ranked to compensate for the Season 11 overhaul. However, the initial update had some unintended consequences.

“We’ve made some pretty big changes to the LP system during preseason, some of which are easy to see (no more division promos) and some of which are more under the hood (improvements to our matchmaking algorithm),” he said in a December 4 blog.

• Read more: League patch 10.25 to feature Rell, Imperial Mandate buffs, more

“There have been some hiccups during the rollout of these systems, but that’s why we do them during the preseason where they have a smaller impact. The end result is that we saw players’ ranks being inflated, which resulted in lower LP gains in the short term.”

With the kinks ironed out ⁠— so players won’t get weird 12 LP gains and 25 LP losses for now ⁠— Riot is feeling confident about their changes for next season. Overall, players should expect LP gains and losses to be smaller, but the system as a whole to feel fairer without promotion series.

“We’re planning to do a smaller ranked reset at the start of the season so you stay closer to the rank you’ve achieved this year, and removing divisional promotion series makes people climb faster, and benefit more from a win streak,” he stated.

“The combination of these two changes would cause significant rank inflation, so in order for the ranking system to stay accurate, we needed to tone back the amount of LP gained per win.”