Riot remove League promo series in major Season 11 ranked shake-up

League of Legends will officially be removing its iconic inter-divisional promos in all competitive LoL ranked queues starting from the Season 11 preseason, Riot Games has announced.

Players will no longer have to play a three-game series to be promoted to the next division within their ranked tier, Riot developer Cody ‘Codebear’ Germain confirmed in a Season 11 blog post shared on September 17.

“Inter-division promotion games were initially implemented to provide compelling goals for players to tackle between LoL tiers,” Germain said. 

“[However], at best they were a source of relief, and at worst a source of major frustration when you were bounced out for the fifth time in a row.

“We wanted to revisit the decision, and solve the unnecessary frustration and climbing blocks between queue divisions. As such, at the start of preseason, we’ll be removing the inter-division promotion series in both queues.”

After moving from one division to the next, Riot will hand you all your leftover LP to continue your climb. There will also no longer be inter-division demotion protection, which previously gave players on a losing streak a three-game buffer before they are dropped down a division.

The planned ranked series changes will not extend to promo series between tiers, like promoting from Silver to Gold. These major ranked movements will still require League of Legends players to win a best-of-five series to move into the next tier.

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“We do still believe between-tier promos are an important part of keeping progression between tiers meaningful and challenging,” Germain explained.

Season 11 will also see League’s back-end MMR come under Riot’s microscope, the devs confirmed. The core goals heading into 2021 would be “matchmaking quality” and “ranked transparency,” to promote more balance in solo queue.

Finally, Riot has taken aim at smurfs in their Season 11 ranked update too.

“We’re testing in some select regions a Matchmaking upgrade that takes into account players rank, along with MMR,” Mark Yetter said. “This has many benefits including grouping smurfs as some of you have already caught on to.”