League of Legends is set for a significant overhaul of its matchmaking and LP system in the 2024 season, aiming to enhance player experience and address long-standing issues.
Riot Games is introducing a proprietary system early this year, with plans to transition to “TrueSkill 2” later on. This system, already used in games like Halo and Gears of War, has sparked debate among LoL players, particularly regarding its suitability for the game’s unique dynamics.
The primary goal of these changes is to make it harder for players to fall into negative LP states, such as gaining less LP for wins than they lose for defeats. This shift is expected to alleviate the frustrations associated with the current system, where players often feel stuck or unrewarded for their efforts.
Riot is keen to emphasize that the new system will not encourage players to prioritize individual performance metrics, like KDA, over the core objective of winning matches. While in-game metrics will play a role in determining rewards, the win/loss outcome will remain the primary focus.
In response to community concerns about the current state of ranked play, Riot developers have acknowledged the issues. A fan expressed frustration on Reddit about the ease of achieving high ratings on new accounts compared to the grind on existing ones, feeling that their efforts over the years were wasted.
RiotIksar, a developer, responded, “We’re going to be making a number of significant changes to matchmaking and ranked over the course of the year — mostly in the background. Ideally, there is no reason to create a new account to get to your ‘actual’ rank, and if you make a new account to smurf — we can detect that and place you into accurate matches so quickly that creating smurf accounts feels like too much work for the amount of games you get to smash people.”
RiotIksar further elaborated on the upcoming changes, “We’re moving to a different proprietary (riot-made) system at the start of the new year (ish) and then tentatively planning on moving to a new system later in the year called trueskill 2. We’re still evaluating on trueskill for now but it sounds promising.”
“We’ll share more info when we have it — there are already some changes in place for the start of the new split that should help put new accounts at an appropriate ranked placement — and also some other changes that should make getting into a negative LP state much more difficult (think -30, +20). We’ll have to see what actually happens in practice, though — I suspect there will be many adjustments/corrections/bugfixes over the course of the year. I am confident we’ll be in a better spot regardless.”
These changes represent a significant step by Riot Games to refine the competitive experience in League of Legends. While the full impact of these updates remains to be seen, the developer’s commitment to addressing community concerns and improving the ranked system is clear.
What do you think about these changes? Will they improve your ranked experience in League of Legends? Share your thoughts in the comments below.