It looks like the prayers of many League of Legends players have been answered by Riot Games. Ed “SapMagic” Altorfer, the lead metagame system designer for Riot, has announced that the developer will be discontinuing positional ranking worldwide on March 13.
In a developer’s post, SapMagic acknowledged the vast majority of players who didn’t enjoy positional ranking due to its “grindiness, low satisfaction of off-position games, and teammates not taking off-position games seriously enough.”
In fact, since positional ranking launched, there was a negative shift of 20 to 30 percent in satisfaction for the feature among North American and Korean players. “Ultimately, we didn’t feel like we could make position ranks the experience you deserve by tweaking LP splashing or making changes to promotion series,” SapMagic said.
As a result, Riot will be ending the positional ranks preview for all regions. Additionally, the rollback will have your highest positional rank become your new rank—you’ll keep your ranked rewards and all promotion helper benefits will carry over as well. Riot is looking into keeping positional matchmaking, but plans for that are not solid yet.
Sapmagic also said that Riot plans to perform a partial ranked reset for high elo players in order to solve the matchmaking issues in ranks of Diamond and higher. The developer is aiming to apply the reset in late March, but the date isn’t set in stone, either.
He explained that when the Iron and Grandmaster tiers were added, it introduced a bug that allowed “a nontrivial number of players” to get to Grandmaster. A second bug also allowed some Diamond players to climb to ranks that they shouldn’t have been able to reach.
To fix these issues, players above Master tier will all be reset down to Masters with zero LP. Diamond players will be getting demoted one division, with the lowest division being Diamond IV. Grandmaster and Challenger ranks will also be temporarily locked. Grandmaster will unlock one week after the reset and Challenger will return the week after.
