League of Legends ranked changes are set to give you a promotion

pcgamesn.com:

League of Legends ranked changes are on the way for LoL ranked split 2 of the 2023 season. Riot’s world-beating MOBA is about to deploy a rank reset for the second half of the year, and the team talks about how its season 13 changes have been going, the new Emerald rank, and why you’re probably better at League of Legends than you thought.

Riot’s Chris ‘Auberaun’ Roberts seems largely happy with the key changes made moving into this year’s ranked season, which included a shortening of Promotion Series and the removal of visible rank influence from matchmaking. However, he admits that the latter change has resulted in more smurfs in regular games, saying the team “knowingly made the tradeoff” to improve the returning player experience, but isn’t happy with “the current impact of smurfing.”

So what’s coming in ranked split 2, which is set to begin July 8? System lead Evan ‘Revenancer’ Humphreys explains, and it’s good news for the vast majority of players. “Historically, League has had a very bottom-heavy distribution of rankings,” he says, with more than 60% of the players typically residing in the Silver and Bronze ranks. Typically, online games tend to have the Silver/Gold split as the point where the ‘average’ skill player lies.

This means that “compared to most games with similar ranking systems, we label a significant portion of players one tier lower.” That’s right, you haven’t been in ELO hell after all – Riot just rates everyone a bit lower than you might have expected. That’s being changed in split 2, meaning that “many players will see their end rank be higher than before.”

Those players have to go somewhere, of course, and simply shuffling more people up into the high-end ranks might diminish their exclusivity