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Riot Games is introducing major changes to Ranked in League of Legends. With these changes, players are surely in for a different experience once they start grinding their way to the top in Solo Queue starting from League of Legends Season 13 Ranked Split 2. This is not the first set of changes that the developer is making to Ranked this season. Earlier this year, there were changes made to the promotion series, visible rank was removed from matchmaking, and the Ranked season was split into two for players.
While Riot Games is happy with these changes, it is further introducing more updates during the Ranked Mid-Season in July 2023. The biggest change to Ranked is the introduction of a new tier called Emerald.
Here’s all you need to know about the new, upcoming Emerald rank and the way you will be playing the ranked mode in the coming months.
What is the Emerald rank in League of Legends?
In the recent Dev Update, League of Legends Executive Producer Jeremy “Brightmoon” Lee and Head of League Studio Andrei “Meddler” van Roon touched upon the updates to Ranked.
In a follow-up blog post, Game Design Manager Even “Revenancer” Humphreys talked in detail about the reasoning behind the Ranked changes and Riot Games’ philosophy on the mode.
Evidently, League of Legends has had a very bottom-heavy distribution of rankings and Bronze and Silver represent below average/average, while Gold and Platinum represent above average and very good players respectively. Riot Games said, “Our ranks have typically biased low, with more than 60% of players typically in Silver and Bronze. Currently, in League, many Silver players are actually above average in skill, while Gold players are significantly above average.”
The developers stated that compared to most games with similar ranking systems, Riot labels a significant portion of players one tier lower. This is what is changing in Split 2 and distributions are going to move to a more even percentage split, centering around gold, according to the developers.
However, Riot Games is strict on not changing the highest ranks in League of Legends to retain the exclusivity and prestige they’ve historically had. So to mitigate inflation in the Diamond tier, Riot Games is adding a new rank: Emerald.
The Emerald rank will be between Diamond and Platinum and will be representing a roughly similar percentage of players as Platinum does currently.
To bring in this new rank of Emerald, Riot Games will be doing a partial reset. “This works like the typical resets you’re used to but with your initial reset being smaller than usual, effectively starting you at a higher rank than you would have started at in prior resets,” said the company.
To aid this, the following changes are being brought in for Split 2 Ranked:
Placement games will be lowered from 10 to five.
Promotion series are getting removed: Starting the next split, players can move directly through tiers whenever they have accumulated enough LP.
