All ranked changes coming to LoL in 2025

With the 2025 ranked season quickly approaching League of Legends, Riot Games is making some much-needed changes to the game.

In 2024, the League ranked season saw further divides into three splits, completely changing how players approached competitive games. Despite making the solo queue climb more dynamic, this change was seen as harmful to players, who were discouraged by their rank getting refreshed. Riot heard this, and other feedback is making some necessary changes in 2025.

All ranked changes coming to League of Legends in 2025

In preparation for the 2025 season, Riot discussed and divided the major ranked features into four categories: resets, returning to ranked, inflation, and alternative accounts.

There will only be one ranked reset in 2025

In its latest developer blog, Riot acknowledged the burning issue with rankings reset. With the introduction of the third split, constantly climbing back to your rank quickly became too tedious and exhausting. With that in mind, there will be only one rank reset in 2025.

“We’ll have one big reset at the start of the year without any additional resets after,” Riot explained. With that in mind, how players earn Victorious skins will also change.

From 2025 onward, players must win 15 games of any type of ranked game to receive a standard Victorious skin. But they still need to climb to obtain chroma versions of those skins. “We want to reward you for your time in Ranked in each Season, as well as make the base Victorious skin more achievable,” Riot said

MMR will be reset “less aggressively.” As a result, higher-ranked players should be matched with others around the same level after the rank resets at the beginning of the next season.

Returning to ranked will remain unchanged

With the addition of split three in 2024, Riot modified the decay rate of accounts whose owners took a break longer than six months from League. These players’ ranks dropped if they were away for long. The developer decided to leave this feature.

Previously, returning players “often experienced high 30 percent to low 40 percent win rates upon returning to the game.” Now, however, those win rates are substantially higher but not too high (around 50 percent).

Ranked inflation isn’t too big to address yet

Changes to the ranked mode in recent years led to “moderate rank inflation,” according to Riot. It showed in a few rankings that it was too overcrowded or significant skill-related differences existed between a Diamond player in one region and a Diamond in another.

Riot said it realized the addition of split three impacted the inflation. While it was large enough for the developer to notice, there are no plans to address it at the time being.

Riot wants to do something about alternative accounts

With the MMR reset each split, Riot can catch accounts whose ranks are potentially manipulated. But “a lot of new accounts” are boosted each season. While there are no official plans, Riot intends to keep an eye on this aspect of the solo queue and eventually launch a solution.

The ranked updates aren’t the only changes coming to League in 2025. New gameplay features, like a fresh jungle monster and mode, are also coming. Rot didn’t confirm the release date of the ranked update, but we believe it will launch in January 2025 with Patch 25.S1.1 (formerly Patch 15.1). The update is meant to arrive on the PBE servers on Dec. 11.