League of Legends players frustrated by hitting that ranked promo wall may be in luck.
League product lead for competitive gameplay Cody “Codebear” Germain discussed current and future plans for ranked in today’s dev blog post. And it’s “looking likely” that inter-division promotions will be removed in the 2021 preseason.
“Toward the goal of improving progression satisfaction and skill expression in our systems, 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.
While this is exciting news for many annoyed players, Codebear also explained that demotion protection will be looked at. If players can move up divisions without participating in a promo series, then dropping ranks without a forgiving shield will also be adjusted.
Removing promo games has been a fan-requested change for some time now. A promo series can easily derail a player’s progress, especially if they’re unfortunate enough to encounter an AFK or griefer during those games.
Riot also has plans to modify matchmaking to include “rank spread limits” and “skill level transparency,” as well as develop a cohesive vision for team-based modes, like Clash and Flex queue.
While it’s likely that promo games will be removed for next season, it’s still tentative and liable to change.
Promotion games have always doomed League of Legends players since season 2 when the ladder was reworked. Players considered and still consider it unfair that you need multiple games to reach the plateau only to be hit by an artificial barrier like the Promotion Series. The most annoying thing is that you don’t get League Points for winning a game in the series, but you lose League Points for losing a game. If you lose the series, you need to win at least 3 games to reach the next division. This creates an artificial barrier holding people down from divisions.
The MMR is different compared to the League standings and the removal of these promotion games will help balance it out. Currently there are plenty of cases of Silver/Gold players playing with Platinum/Diamond ones. It’s great that this change is coming soon. Too bad that the change is coming so late that many players have quit playing solo queue and burned out due to this poor ladder system.
Every change is welcome and hopefully those players will come back to improve the overall ladder experience. More people increase competitivity.
