League of Legends: Wild Rift is reverting back to a rank and matchmaking rating combination system for ranked games after switching awayfrom it in Patch 2.5. This U-turn comes after players complained about large ranked gaps in matchmaking. In October, Wild Rift announced certain gameplay updates to the game which included matchmaking changes. Instead of matchmaking players based on rank and ratings, players were only to be paired based on matchmaking ratings. The reason for this shift was to ensure that players in higher and lower skill could find matches quickly without much impact on match fairness and quality.
Effect of matchmaking rating for Ranked matches on Wild Rift
In Wild Rift ranked, matchmaking rating is how a player is expected to perform in-game. This is decided based on a player’s wins and losses and it’s different from Rank, which rewards a player’s actual performance. So, players can have the same rank but different matchmaking ratings. The Wild Rift team noted that the new way of matching players had its desired effect.
However, it came with noticeable consequences for players in the game. One of the major ones was that players started to experience huge gaps in ranks both within and between teams. The more players started to get matched with people of similar skills, the more the gaps in ranks showed. To solve this problem, there will be an update for players to revert back to the old way of matchmaking. However, newly ranked players will still be allowed to match up to Gold-level games.
Changes to ranked matchmaking
The next update on Wild Rift will see more restrictions on rank gaps allowed in and between teams. The update will also keep the expanded window for Iron and Bronze players to allow them to match with Gold players and reduce queue time. Master players and above may also see an increase in queue times in order to match with higher-ranked players.
