Ranked play is set for a big change when League of Legends: Wild Rift introduces Patch 2.4 with season three, including the addition of a banning phase and the removal of promotional games.
Riot shared details of their plans in a post claiming that a big reason for the move away from promotional matches was linked to player engagement at lower ranks.
“After comparing the competitive intent of Promotion Matches against engagement skill data, we found that they were doing more harm than good for players,” Riot’s principal game designer Nextdoor wrote. “In the lower ranks we saw that promotion losses were more likely than usual to cause to give up the ranked climb. Our assumption is that players value Promotion Marches more than regular matches, so losing a Promotion Match feels extra bad and discourages further playing.”
According to the team, it wasn’t just in the lower ranks that promotional matches were causing noticeable differences. Even at a higher level, players would stop playing the ranked mode after successfully getting their promotion out of fear of being deranked and having to go through the promo stages once again.
Given their judgment on the situation, Wild Rift will no longer have promotion matches and players will simply advance to the next rank once they’ve achieved adequate ladder points.
Also in the statement, Riot spoke regarding its long-awaited decision to add bans to the game. Riot said it would prefer to have the standard 10 bans, but due to the current champion pool, three bans per team ensures that players still have a variety of champions to choose from. Along with that change, you’ll now be required to own 16 champions to compete within ranked, including those in free rotation.
There are a few other small changes to how the mode will function, you can check out the full list of everything here.
These changes will be taking place when Wild Rift season three launches on July 27.