LoL Leagues Changes

Riot Socrates has posted up a set of preseason changes that are coming to the Leagues system – including an increase of challenger tier’s size, tier demotion.

Here’s Riot Socrates with more info from reddit:

“Hey all,

We’re making some changes to the League system. While we received a lot of positive feedback regarding leagues, there are a few key areas we felt could use improvement.

• Clarity surrounding LP gains (why am I getting so little LP per win?)
• Players having less motivation to win games when they hit division V and becoming more toxic (due to immunity from ever falling from a tier)
• Challenger currently represents too small of a group of players in solo duo.

These changes are hitting the PBE now and will be live next week after the end of Season 3:

• Clarity of progression is a major point of feedback we wanted to act on, so we’re removing clamping completely for anyone below Diamond I

Players should no longer see tiny LP gains except in extreme edge cases or at the top of Diamond I. The small LP gains are necessary in Diamond I to ensure Challenger represents only the very best players and is highly accurate.

• Tier demotion & shielding have been added

When we investigated player performance over the season we found that a small but not insubstantial group of players would reach division V of a tier and then consistently become more toxic and start to lose more frequently. Though tier immunity was originally intended to combat ladder anxiety we feel that complete immunity creates poor incentives and leads to abuse of the system. This makes ranked play a worse experience for everyone and isn’t what a division V placement should represent. When you enter division V you’ll have a set number of games where you are invulnerable to dropping a tier, currently this is 10 but it is subject to change. After this if you fall more than a full tier below your placement in terms of MMR, a warning will appear in your profile. So for example, a Gold V player playing at a Silver V skill level would see this warning. Continuing to lose games at 0 LP would result in their demotion to division I of the next lowest tier, or Silver I in this case.

• Challenger tier size increased to 200 in solo / duo

The skill gap between players at 0 LP and 100 LP in Diamond I is simply too wide and there is a logjam of extremely skilled players vying for Challenger at the top of Diamond 1. We want to ease some of that pressure recognize more players by increasing the number of spots in that tier.

Let us know what you think!

Riot Socrates”