CabbageCZ

/u/CodeofBear while people are tagging you with feedback - have you guys ever considered re-thinking the intended rank distribution (% of players in gold, plat, dia etc)?

I ask because in most other competitive games (off the top of my head - Overwatch, Starcraft, CSGO, DotA2...), gold, and especially plat and diamond (or equivalents) are much larger portions of the playerbase.

In other games, 'gold' is usually the most populated, bell curve 'average' rank (roughly 50th percentile), and things above gold tend to be around 33% of the best (67th percentile onward). Some examples:

• In League, at 50th percentile you're roughly Silver 3. In other games you'd be roughly mid Gold.

• In League, at 70th percentile, you're Gold 2-3. In other games you'd be roughly mid Platinum.

• In League, at 85th percentile, you're Gold 1-2. In other games, you'd be high plat or low diamond.

My hunch is that that discrepancy can actually lead to some interesting implications when it comes to player psychology, and could contribute in some part to the toxicity in the community given the more likely percieved lack of progression even if people put their nose to the grindstone etc. Not even talking about casual comparisons with friends in other games breaking down, that's kind of a minor point.

Anyways, you guys are the professionals, but I wanted to raise this in case Riot wasn't really aware of the discrepancy, since it seems you guys are looking roughly in this problem space right now.

Thanks for the discussion -- rank tiering and percentile bands is something we're always looking at (it's something we review bi-weekly).

This season we've opened up tiering a tiny bit and we're evaluating how it's performing. Nothing too crazy in either direction, so there isn't anything glaring about the distribution we want to jump on just yet.

We're seeing a pretty healthy percentage of the bell-curve straddle either side of low gold, which is functioning pretty healthily. Again, we look at this every two weeks and compare it over time, so it's constantly being re-evaluated.

bz6

/u/CodeofBear

This is an awesome post and something that is LONG overdue for the game. I remember when Riot first broke the level barrier from 30 to progress further I felt pretty bummed as there was a mere emote as recognition for veteran players. As we all know, leveling to 30 back in the day was way harder and took a lot of time.

That being said, what I hope these updates do are the following:

1) Enhance visual prestige from Ranked. The ladder over the years has lost a bit of it's exclusivity and prestige. Visual flexing may aid that a bit (outside of the obvious behavioral/matchmaking problems). Side note can the Ranked borders get a visual change? They're too thin and lack that sudden visual impact.

2) Recognize veterans.

3) Introduce new exclusive ways to express yourself. Unobtainable/exclusive rewards feel very nice to show off in lobby/profile.

4) Improve Clash recognition.

That's pretty much all I can think of off the top of my head.

Cheers <3

First, thank you for the feedback.

We've already made some changes since I wrote the article that seem to be in-line with general sentiment being expressed through social channels right now and align with our lab groups pretty heavily too, which I'm excited about.

One of the key pieces of feedback was essentially "don't tone down rank", while still giving good solid priority weight to non-ranked identity expressions. Additionally, this paired nicely with your #3 point of "introduce new exclusive ways to express yourself" and we have some options on the table that we think we're going to move forward with, but nothing to follow up with just yet.

For #4 -- I really want this to be true, we're trying to carve out space to really make some improvements for Clash, and part of the identity update effort may include some of it, however big changes for Clash won't be on the table until the 2022 Clash season as of right now.

Zellion-Fly

I'm holding my breath.

This is all lines up to be £ternal$ 2.0

Be ready for them to charged £10 for "one trick" tag.

Hell, even money to select your boarder.

No charges planned in this space.