Matt Leung-Harrison@RiotPhroxzon
Apex LP Gains
Hey everyone,
We’ve had a lot of attempted changes to resolve some of the root issues with the Apex experience this year. Some have worked OK and others haven’t worked as well.
We wanted to shine a light on changes that are going out (hopefully) today and how we’re going to approach it for the near term and wanted to apologize for the experience that people have been running into so far.
Does every region have negative LP gains?
- Less than 5 of our 16 regions are having negative LP gains in Apex right now, and they’re to varying extents
- Some of those are experiencing it consistently and others, just a little bit, and most, none at all
Is Aegis of Valor causing this?
- We don’t see any long term impacts on LP gains caused by Aegis
- Especially given that the majority of regions are functioning completely fine
What’s going on then?
- Masters being more achievable this Season & the best players getting stronger as the years go on is expanding the gap between the bottom of Master and the top of Challenger.
- The addition of Challenger duos made it more challenging to balance some of these games
- While we took pre-emptive mitigations to reduce the impact of things like Rank 1 & 2 duoing together, they weren’t powerful enough and resulted in the best players catapulting further ahead
- The rollout of our improved Matchmaking and better balance to duos (this is now Live in every region); does a better job of balancing duos and balancing autofills to make Apex matches more balanced in over 90% of cases, but there is still work to be done when the very best players are duoing together
- In the Live Ranked system, the max LP attainable has a soft cap to prevent LP gains from getting too high, which combined with the above issues has led to a less than ideal apex ladder experience
Are you going to reset the ladder?
- There are some set of people who are really vocal about resetting the ladder; we hear the concerns and are taking them seriously
- At the same time, there are a lot of players who will find it very frustrating for all their progress to be reset and while some players will be happy we reset it, others will not, so we’re continuing to evaluate
The changes we’re making
- To reiterate, in the Live Ranked system, the max LP attainable has a soft cap to prevent LP gains from getting too high
- The closer you get to the top of the ladder, you need a higher and higher winrate to climb.
- ie. As a player gets closer and closer to the cap, their gains will approach +10/-30
- We’re going to remove this cap, which will unbound LP on the top end and result in the very best players being able to play and climb to pretty high LP values (+30/-10LP until they start to reach where they should be)
- It will also make LP gains for the entire Apex ladder more stable, but LP cutoffs for Grandmaster and Challenger will also increase when most players no longer have negative LP gains
- We expect most regions to reach peak LP’s of around 3000 and in some of the top end cases, close to 4000
- Grandmaster and Challenger are meant to be very difficult to achieve and it’s intended to be challenging to get there (in the same way that an Emerald player should look at Diamond and feel like it’s going to be difficult to achieve)
- At the same time, we’ve heard your feedback that hitting these ranks feels too daunting and grindy (though there is an expectation that the peak ranks in a game are going to require more dedication to keep, we need to strike a good sweet spot here)
The future
- Us making climbing at apex less daunting caused us to add Grandmaster several years ago and we’re nearing some of those feels now; the skill gaps in Apex are getting too big
- In some regions also, the number of Grandmaster/Challenger slots being too low for how big their region is is also contributing to the cutoffs being very high (EUW being a notable example) -> curious on thoughts on increasing this
- We might also reconsider the top end of how much LP you can gain per win, but need to be considerate of how much this incentivizes smurfing
- Changes to systems like these are a natural part of League being a long-lived game and having growing player skills over time
Thank you for being patient with us as we fix all the things and we’ll continue to work to make the top of ladder climbing experience the best it can be.
