Riot Games Reverts Matchmaking Changes in Wild Rift Following Player Complaints

Riot Games reverts the matchmaking changes in League of Legends: Wild Rift following the recent complaints from players. The players' complaints were with regards to large rank gaps in matchmaking which put everyone at a disadvantage. The devs stated that they will be bringing back the old matchmaking system where players will now be ranked with players who are closer to their rank divisions. However, there will be a few tweaks added to make sure ranked queues will be much faster and more efficient without much impact on the game’s match quality and fairness. Aside from the matchmaking update, the devs have also made gameplay changes to the Rift Herald to prevent players from abusing its power.

Wild Rift matchmaking gets reverted and the Rift Herald gets nerfed

After the most recent changes to the matchmaking queue in the Wild Rift Patch 2.5 update, players complained about teammates who are far off in terms of rank divisions. This meant that low-tier players could be matched against players far ahead of them in terms of skills just because they had a winning streak in their matches.

A few days after the new matchmaking system was implemented, Riot Games decided to revert back to the old matchmaking. This was revealed through a vlog post on the official Wild Rift website.

“Using only MMR has lowered your confidence that we’re matching you with and against players of similar skill, so we’re planning to revert most of these matchmaking changes in an upcoming hotfix” stated Josh Menke, Principal Game Designer at Riot Games.

The dev added that since the new matchmaking worked efficiently on low-tier players, they will be keeping it up until the Gold tier. Once players reach beyond Gold rank, the old matchmaking system will be used to match them with players closer to their rank division.

Josh further explained that players may still occasionally see players who are far off their rank division but this shall only apply to lobbies where the queue times are too long.

Additionally, another hotfix has also been added to apply balance changes to the Rift Herald. According to the devs, the strategy of using two heralds to easily melt down turrets is too overwhelming in competitive matches. A huge nerf to the Rift Herald’s damage to turrets has been implemented along with a reduction in time for players to hold on to the herald summon before it expires.

Rift Herald

• Hold duration: 240s → 210s

• Nexus damage: 100% of base damage → 50% of base damage

It will be interesting to see if these new adjustments have a positive impact on the ranked environment of Wild Rift.