
Cover image and thumbnail courtesy Riot Games
- Riot is taking note of player frustrations with ranked promos and is doing away with them for pre-season next year.
Cody “Codebear” Germain, League’s competitive gameplay product manager, discussed Riot’s upcoming plans in a dev blog post. Apart from opening Flex restrictions, “it's looking likely that we’ll be removing inter-division promotions to reduce frustration of seemingly hitting a wall when you know you’ve been playing well," Codebear said. These changes will probably take effect in the 2021 preseason.
In addition to this, they’ll be revamping inter-division demotion protections “to make sure that players are able to get where they should be in both directions without false limitations.”
Riot will be looking to include rank spread limits and skill level transparency updates, given how frustrating it is playing matches where displayed ranks are very far apart, regardless of how close everyone is in MMR. There are also going to be thematic changes to the Victorious skin line which is released every season as rewards for players who get a rank of Gold and above.
The game developer has also taken note of the increasing number of premades across queues and is looking for long term solutions to create a healthy team ecosystem for Clash and Flex play, as well as changes to how players find others to play with and recognizing teams that stick together and giving them something to strive for long-term.
All these proposed changes are still tentative, stay tuned for more Riot dev updates.