Riot is planning on making some new changes to League of Legends’ matchmaking systems going into the summer. The Dev team blog post explained plenty of new changes coming to LoL, including autofill, champ select and more. One of the major changes that was explained is the removal of intra-division promotion series.
Intra-division promotion series have always felt like a roadblock for progression among the League of Legends ranks. Unlike Valorant, each subdivision of ranks (ex. Bronze 2 -> Bronze 1) requires a promotion series just to advance to the next tier. It is a stagnation of a climb for many players because there is no LP gained during wins, only LP lost after a failed completion of a series. Riot plans on removing this feature, but that will involve another set of issues to tackle. “This means we’ll also need to look at inter-division demotion protections to make sure that players are able to get where they should be in both directions without false limitations,” stated Cody “Riot Codebear” Germain in the blog post.
More Positive Features
Another important feature proposed in the blog post was the inclusion of a reporting button in champ select. Many players have experienced toxic behavior in champ select, specifically when a player loses out on their main or does not get their favorite role. The use of the report button is to “establish a data foundation”, and soon there will be real punishment implemented.
Among other changes Riot has been working to change is the autofill system. A frustrating aspect of autofill is having multiple autofill teammates on your squad. A previous issue with autofill was that some teammates would lose out on their primary roles due to a bug in the autofill system. Now, both autofill imbalance and the bug have been addressed by the dev team and adjusted.
Looking at all of the issues laid out (and having experienced a few myself), it is good to have Riot address all of them in a transparent way. The team even made a blog post earlier this year discussing what they hoped to change up to this point. The consistent communication with the community will always be beneficial for any dev team. We have seen this especially with all of the updates from Riot’s second title, Valorant. The removal of intra-division series and champ select reports will go into effect during this summer. Whether these changes will prove beneficial for the community is yet to be seen. Either way, the effort to make LoL a more enjoyable game is always welcome.
