Riot to implement new Emerald rank, remove promos in massive LoL ranked changes

The ranked grind is about to get a lot more interesting for League of Legends enthusiasts.

In a developer blog today, Riot Games revealed a handful of important changes coming to League’s ranked mode later this summer. There will be a new Emerald rank for summoners to dive into, which will be placed between the Platinum and Diamond ranks. By adding this new rank, players should see a much more balanced rank distribution percentage, with relatively even numbers from Silver to Platinum.

“It’s important to us that the highest ranks retain the exclusivity and prestige they’ve historically had, so we’re not changing anything about how those ranks are distributed,” game design manager Evan “Revenancer” Humphries said. “Flattening the curve without compensating somehow would result in significant inflation in Diamond. In order to mitigate this we’re adding a new rank: Emerald… [which] will live between Diamond and Platinum and represent a roughly similar percentage of players as Platinum does today.”

Additionally, Riot will be removing promotional series from the ranked climb after garnering many years of complaints from the player base about how frustrating promos can be when trying to rise to new heights. From running into griefers to dealing with a string of unlucky games, players have always dreaded promos since ranked was introduced over a decade ago.

The stress of repeatedly slamming through ranked promos for ranks heavily outweighs the benefits of the drama and excitement that they would also bring, so players can simply rank up when they have the proper amount of LP.

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Since most ranked climbers have already played their 10 placement games for the first split, players will now only have to play five placement games for the second split of the year. Riot is also keeping this five-game placement change for next year, so now, players can find out their rank in half the time as before.

Ultimately, Riot is set to make a plethora of different changes that make it easier to get your rank and move up the ladder. These changes should also provide a much more accurate representation of the player base and where they truly belong on the leaderboards moving forward.

League’s first ranked split of 2023 will be coming to a close on Monday, July 17. These changes are expected to go live when Split Two begins right after Split One wraps up.