Tl;dr: With Teamfight Tactics: Remix Rumble around the corner alongside a Ranked Season reset, we’re making some changes to the Ranked experience. Because we’re moving to 4-month sets with no mid-set release, we need to make some updates to smooth out the climb. These updates include the release of Emerald tier, a reduction in penalties for LP decay below Challenger, and an increase in the banked game max to 14 to align with LoL PC. Masters+ players can now enjoy a full 2-week vacation!
Why Are We Making Ranked Updates Now?
As we announced at the beginning of 2023, TFT will no longer be releasing mid-sets to instead focus on releasing three full sets a year. As a result of that, we’re no longer going to have a mid-set ranked season reset - seasons will last 4 months, the full duration of each set.
With the increase in ranked season length, we needed to shift our philosophy on how a ranked climb should look & feel in TFT. We wanted to take the opportunity to not only make the necessary changes we needed to just deliver a ranked experience for this extension, but improve on the existing one. We also want players to feel like they’ve earned their rank, and that it’s representative of their skill. We aren’t shipping super transformative updates, but they should be impactful & meaningful.
Our first change - it will be slightly easier & faster to rank up to Platinum & below. Beyond that, it’ll start to take more games to achieve higher ranks compared to before, but the percentage of games required is less than the amount we are increasing season length by. To put it simply, longer seasons = more games required to climb, but it’s not a 1:1 increase.
That also leads into our next topic - the addition of the Emerald ranked tier
Introducing Emerald Tier
With the release of Remix Rumble, we’re matching our friends on LoL PC and adding Emerald Tier, which will exist between Platinum and Diamond ranks. Adding this extra tier helps to flatten the curve of ranked skill disparity - with more nuance between ranks, each rank is a more accurate representation of an individual player’s skill level, especially between Platinum and Diamond.
More Time, Less Decay
We are also using this update to revisit our rules on LP decay at Masters+. Decay exists to make you defend your place at the top of the ladder and continue to prove that you are one of the best TFT players in the world. Up until now, you could “bank” up to 10 games, with 1 game draining from the bank for each day that you don’t play ranked. If your bank is empty, you take a big hit: -250 LP. We want to keep strong incentives to play at the very top of the ladder, but we are changing this penalty to better reflect the prestige of the associated rank instead of a one-size-fits-all approach:
- For Master, the new penalty will be -50 LP
- For Grandmaster: -150 LP
- And finally, Challenger remains the same at -250 LP.
Additionally, we are increasing the size of the bank from 10 up to 14. With longer seasons, a more generous bank is a way to better accommodate player needs without reducing competitive incentives on the ladder. Masters+ players can now enjoy a full 2-week vacation!
That’s it for now, good luck on your ranked crescendo through Remix Rumble’s ranked ladder
