The recent League of Legends developer update may have been dominated by discussion of the long-awaited Shyvana rework, but Andrei "Meddler" Van Roon and Paul "Pabro" Bellezza also gave some interesting insights into how Ranked is shaping up this season.
According to Van Roon, the time it takes to get into a game is down by about 30 per cent because of tweaks to some of the timers in champion select and harsher punishments for dodging, which is down from 19 per cent of lobbies to just 4 per cent.
This season has also seen significant tweaks to League's matchmaking rating (MMR) system, which was changed to address the clumping up of players of diverse skill levels in the same bracket. In my experience, this season has been a very easy climb compared to past seasons, where MMR seemed to stagnate very quickly.
"For example, we've historically had an outsized population in Iron [League's lowest tier], around 14 per cent of players globally consisting of mostly seasoned veterans," Bellezza explains. "We want Iron to be a place for truly new players rather than a home for people long-term. We chose to adjust the MMR to rank correlation to get...
