League of Legends 14.8 gets new Rank seeding changes, which will “place players more correctly in Ranked”

League of Legends 14.8 rank seeding changes
League of Legends 14.8 rank seeding changes (Image via Riot Games)

League of Legends just got a mid-patch to its Rank seeding, which is expected to place players in the competitive ladder more correctly. Riot Phroxzon recently pointed out some of the details about these changes, including pros and cons that players should expect once the update is live and they boot up for rank.

Talking about the positives of the changes, Riot Phroxzon pointed out:

“This patch, we've pushed some changes to seed all players more correctly in Ranked, regardless of incoming queue (average that we think is correct is ~Silver 4 and this can go up/down depending on your prior performance, especially if you play normals). Previously, new to ranked players who only played ARAM and Bots weren't seeded correctly, but these should be addressed better with the new changes.”

Riot Phroxzon further stated that more is to be done in the new system and that players who were facing seeding bugs back in February will now be placed more appropriately. The bug was seeding players at Gold 1, but they will now face players with actual skill levels.


There will be some downsides to the League of Legends' new 14.8 Rank seeding system

However, Phroxzon also pointed out that all is not positive with the new seeding system:

“Because we can't change visual ranks easily, all new to Ranked players will be playing in games more appropriate for their skill level. As a result of that however, new to ranked players caught in the transition period will have negative LP gains. In the case of the players in segment 2 above, these can be pretty bad cases of negative LP gains (+15/-35 in some cases).”

Irrespective of the negative LP gains, Riot Games feels that the tradeoffs for the new League of Legends seeding system are worth it. The studio feels that having newer players matchup with those of their proper skill level is much more important than LP loss and gains.

This is likely to create more competitive fairness, and the League of Legends developer will be updating the system further in future patches.

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