The Finals. Season 2. Ranked Leagues
Last week, season 2 went live, and it's been an absolute blast watching all the plays and experiencing season 2 over the weekend. We've seen fantastic plays using new gadgets and gameplay from the new weapons, and in all honesty, Powers Shift and CIS Rizon have been incredible to see in the hands of all of you.
We were super excited to get this out, and we're super excited that it's here. Now, something that's become apparent over the weekend and also during our community live stream last Friday is that our new ranked system needs a bit of an explanation. So that's the topic for today's article. Let's talk about rankings.
So during season 1 of the finals, we received a lot of feedback from all of you about the ranked experience. We took that feedback and added it on top of the data we collected about how ranked was doing, and something became clear: we had to change up rank. We took the old system, tore it out, removed some parts, and added some new twists and turns, and what we have now is a new system that we firmly believe will lead to a better-ranked experience.
Over time, here's the thing: Nothing is ever final, even if we're in the finals, and so all of your feedback is going to be vital to helping us make this system even better over time, so please try it out and let us know what's missing.
First off, you can find everything about leagues by going into the career menu and then clicking on leagues. Here, you'll see the first new change: placement progress. As you start your journey through ranked in season 2, you're going to begin by playing eight placement rounds. The outcome of these eight placement rounds is what's going to determine your starting rank now, even if you're insane.
Cracked season 1 veteran, don't be worried if your rank is a diamond right of the bat; most players will actually find themselves placing somewhere between bronze and gold initially. And from there, you'll make your way up and down the ranks based on your performance in the rankings. Something to note here is that when we say eight placement matches or eight placement rounds, we mean rounds, which means that if you make it all the way to the finals in a tournament, that will count as four placement rounds, so if a player makes it to the finals twice, they will have all of their eight placement matches done in two games or in two tournaments, but if you find yourself being eliminated in the very first elimination round, it's going to take you eight whole tournaments to complete your placement matches now.
I said something before that I want to touch upon again. This season, it is possible to demote from league to league, meaning that if you do your placement matches and play well for a bit, you may make it all the way up to platinum. If you then suffer from a skill issue for a little bit and lose a lot, it is possible to demote down to gold and so forth down the ladder now.
As you should touch on two things here, you won't instantly demote; the second you hit the threshold for the low end of a rank, there's a little bit of a demote. Prevention thing, there's a little bit of a barrier, but if you consistently perform under your current league, you will eventually demote.
Something more to note here is that you will not demote due to rank DK or simply for not playing; it's only by playing and performing worse in your current league that you will be able to demote. So you can take a break from rank if you need to; it's fine, we can come back. Also, let's touch upon the rewards.
If we look a bit down on the screen as you can see, there's five TI of rewards ranging from bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and diamond, the same as our ranked leagues, and as you journey through ranked in season 2 and you rank up, you unlock more and more of these rewards. Something to note here is that even though you can demote in this season, you are being rewarded based on your highest achieved rank, so if you make it all the way up to diamond, you have qualified for the diamond skin, and you're going to get that at the end of the season.
That's when the rank rewards are paid out, and they're paid out based on your highest-achieved rank. Now, something else that we should touch upon is that in season 2, ranking matters quite a bit more for matchmaking. So what we believe this is going to do is that it's going to lead to closer games with more tense moments and less skill disparity between players.
This might come as a slight cost to matchmaking times, but currently we believe it's worth it to wait a bit longer on a ranked game if the quality of that ranked game is better. But again, please tell us what your experience is like and how you're doing. If you think this is worth it or not, then do tell us what your experience is like overall.
We are looking forward to it a lot. They just about wrapped up how it works and what it looks like, so let's head into the Q&A session. First off, what happened to Fame? Well, Fame, as you know, from season 1, is gone, and we now use a different metric to keep track of your current rank, and that's what we use now to matchmake you.
It's this change that we believe will lead to better quality games over time as people's true rank crystallizes a little bit, but this leads us to our second question with Fame gone. How can I tell how I'm ranking? This is a question we've received a lot since the release of season 2, and it's a very fair question and a very fair point of feedback.
Currently, there's actually no way to tell how you're doing outside of when you rank up or down at the end of a ranked tournament. We realize that this feels a bit lackluster, and we are looking into a way to add some sort of indicator to the game that will tell you at the end of a ranked tournament if you got closer to your ranked goal or if you got further away from your ranked goal.
But until we have that system in place, think of it this way: the thing that determines if you move up or down the ranks is the outcome of the ranked tournament, and that alone means that if you make it further into a tournament, you're going to gain more rank if you are eliminated. Early in a tournament, you might lose more; that's it.
Something to note there, though, is that if you do this, you are going to do matchmaking like a diamond. Lobby matchmaking happens based on the rank of the highest-ranked member in your party, so do keep that in mind. That just about wraps up everything there's to say right now about the new league system.
While we realize that there's some things that are less than ideal here, such as there's no indicator of how you're doing, we are going to look into that, and despite that, we do think this system is an improvement over the system we had in season 1. What I would ask of all of you right now is that you go and play ranked; try it out so you can share your experiences.
