Ranked is one of the most popular game modes in Apex Legends, and achieving a high level in ranked comes with a significant amount of prestige. Every split, there are races to see which players can reach Apex Predator first and who maintains the top ranking in the game at the end of every season.
The end of every split is also a great time to check out just where every player in the game ended up in the ranked system’s tier distribution. Ideally, a competitive game sees a nice bell curve in the ranked distribution when considering the total dedicated player base. Adjusting for players who actually put a significant amount of time into the mode ensures a more accurate depiction of how ranked is functioning and if it is a true representation of a player’s skill since it weeds out a significant faction of players that would inflate the lower ranks due to them not playing the game very much.
Thankfully, Respawn is good at updating players about the ranked distribution seen in the game, and it gives us a pretty good idea about where everyone is placed.
Apex ranked distribution in season 13, split one
The first split of season 13 introduced Ranked Reloaded, the much-hyped changes brought to the ranked system that de-emphasized the power of kills in gaining ranked points and placed a much heavier emphasis on placing highly in a game. This change, in addition to the introduction of tier demotion, clearly led to the average rank amongst all players going down.
- Bronze: 10.8 percent
- Silver: 28.78 percent
- Gold: 44.45 percent
- Platinum: 14.6 percent
- Diamond: 1.25 percent
- Master and Predator: 0.1 percent
In season 12, more than 65 percent of the ranked player base that played for more than 10 hours finished in Platinum or Diamond. After the first split of season 13, the number of players in Platinum and Diamond shrunk to just over 15 percent.
Apex ranked distribution in season 13, split two
While the Ranked Reloaded changes succeeded in giving Apex’s ranked distribution a better bell curve, and not a situation where the bottom part of each ranked tier was filled with players just hanging on thanks to the old tier protection system, it wasn’t without its issues. Namely, there weren’t enough players in higher ranks and the changes overcorrected an original rank inflation problem. To compensate, split two dialed back a few of the Ranked Reloaded changes and got a ranked distribution that looked like this.
- Bronze: 2.22 percent
- Silver: 15.22 percent
- Gold: 41.5 percent
- Platinum: 32.57 percent
- Diamond: 8.05 percent
- Master and Predator: 0.45 percent
Clearly, the changes evened things out more since far more players made it into the Platinum, Diamond, and Master tiers than they had in the split before. Gold remained the most populated rank, while more players made it out of Bronze and Silver as well.
Published: Aug 8, 2022 05:26 pm