Riot finally gives an update on positional ranks, revealing an early release in some regions

It’s been almost a year since Riot revealed plans to push out positional ranks in League of Legends, a system for solo queue that tracks your rank in each unique position, rather than one blanket rank.

Since then, Riot hadn’t given many details on when it would release, until closer to the pre-season, when the company stated it would be delayed until the design team figured out how to address certain concerns from the community. In a dev blog video today, Riot announced that it would be arriving for North America and South Korea at the start of the competitive season on a sort of trial basis. After a split of monitoring and gathering feedback, it should be released for the rest of the world, assuming things go well.

For the most part, the system sounds the same as it did when originally announced. Fortunately, though, Riot did provide some very specific answers to the community’s largest concerns for the first time since the project was announced.

In the Q&A section at the end of the video, Riot pulled up some of those concerns and had the two hosts of the video answer them in a seemingly unscripted segment. Then Riot provided a transcript of those answers in a blog post, which we have included below.

Question: Position ranks seem super abusable. What about position swapping when getting an off-role, for example? Say, a Diamond I top laner got autofilled jungle in a Plat III game and switches to top lane with a duo or teammate.

Primus “Riot Gortok” Majdak: There’s this thing that we want to make sure that we allow, which is strategically swapping if it makes sense—that’s what players do now. We don’t really want to suppress that in any way. So what we’re gonna do is track each player and how often that they’re switching positions. If you’re someone who ends up switching more often than we think is reasonable, we’re going to start to tighten the links between your positions, for the purposes of matchmaking, so that when we put you into a match, it’s gonna be a match that we think is most competitive with your highest position.

Ed “Riot Sapmagic” Altorfer: Yeah, I think something else that’s relevant there is that when you’re actually playing a position and then you swap in champion select or at the beginning of the game, what happens at the end of the game is you’re gonna get LP for the position you played, no matter what. But the problem with that is, if you played in an “easier” game, you’ll also get less LP for winning, but you’ll lose more for losing the game.

Q: Is the new system gonna be more grindy? Like, are you really gonna make me play five times as many ranked games as I did this year?

Riot Gortok: We’ve got a couple mechanics that we’ve baked into the system to help pull you up in your other positions as you play your primary. First of all, splashing will help pull up the other positions until they get close enough to be within range of what we think is reasonable. In addition to that, as your highest rank gets higher, it starts to actually become a target for the other positions, where when they’re climbing, they get a little bit of bonus if they’re trying to catch up. So it’s actually easier to climb in the second, third, and so on, positions.

Q: Since games where I’m not playing my main position have way less impact on the rank I care about, can’t I just feed or surrender when I get autofilled to get a faster shot at playing my main again?

Sapmagic: This is pretty much the core concern that both we as a team and you as players have expressed to us over the entire year that we’ve been working on position ranks.

Riot Gortok: More than that.

Sapmagic: Yeah, probably more than that. And the answer, honestly, is splashing. So we talked about how when you win or lose games, you splash some LP to other positions—that works both in a positive sense and also in a negative sense. If you’re trying your hardest when you get an off position, we don’t want to punish you for that. So splashing does start fairly low, but what we do want to address is either systemic abuse of the systems through people just queuing up and surrendering or feeding, and we also want to combat situations where someone’s been miscalibrated, like one of their ranks is higher than it actually should be and they’ve started losing a lot of games. So as you lose more and as your performance gets worse over those games, the negative splashing starts to ramp up and hit you harder to your other positions that you either care about more or that might be miscalibrated.