Apex Legends Ranked Leagues

We'd like to talk about the Ranked Leagues coming to Apex Legends. We will go into detail about the ideas, goals, and all the core principles behind Ranked Leagues, which will be introduced on July 2nd along with Season 2.

For us, Apex is a fast-paced game where you can't just become a master on the fly. This takes time and effort. The developers conceived Ranked Leagues as a place where players who yearn for a competitive mode (or those who like to compete with others from time to time) could demonstrate their skills and get their share of glory.

Goals of introduction of rating leagues

Ranked leagues are designed to make Apex Legends even more exciting game and add something new to it. Let's talk a little about what can be achieved by introducing these leagues.

• First and foremost, reward competitive players for the time they put into Apex Legends. For this, a rating table will be used, in which you can compare your achievements with the achievements of other players from the base. In addition, at the end of the season, you will receive in-game rewards that will depend on the rank you have reached.
• The second goal is to make sure that opponents always fight on equal terms and players are selected based on their skills. You can't call someone a badass player if all they do is take out newbies in Skull City. Matchmaking in Ranked Leagues aims to bring together people of approximately equal skill levels in the same match. This does not mean that you will always fight with players of your particular category (for example, Silver players can sometimes fight with players from the Gold category), but the main goal is to match someone as equal in level as possible who is in your region and logs into the game at the same time of day.
• Another goal is to create a niche at the top of the table, where the best players would form a "meta" for the pros, without imposing their play style on the weaker players. For this, rewards for a place in a match and kills were introduced and certain restrictions were made for them. After all, support players or team players deserve just as much reward as others, even if they don't manage to get 15 kills in every game. When developing the scoring system, the creators of the game were guided by the fact that it should be fair and focused on winning.
• The next goal is to develop a true measure of skill in Apex Legends. Initially, players will use a scoring ranking system (more on that in the Scoring section), but we plan to transition to another system over time. Ranked mode players will be tracked to understand what determines success in the leaderboard, which players climb the leaderboard faster than others, and how the “metagame” of players with a high level of skill manifests itself. Developers will use the data that comes from the introduction of ranked leagues to refine the system over time. Therefore, every season there will be a partial rollback of the rating. Players will start the new season from a lower position in the table. In subsequent seasons, the scoring system, the matchmaking system, and ultimately the ranked format itself will also change.

Work principles

The scoring system has now been modeled using season 1 player data to calibrate the approach to ranked leagues. Based on these data, the following principles of operation of the first rating series have been developed:

Series and rollbacks

Ranked leagues will run in periods called "series". The first series will run during Season 2 (July to September). Subsequent Ranked Series may not coincide with the Apex Seasons as it may take longer for players to settle into their true skill level. How the next episodes will play out will be revealed towards the end of Season 2.

Ranks

Ranked leagues are represented by six categories: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and Apex Predator. Each category, except for Apex Predator, is divided into four divisions, such as Gold IV, Gold III, Gold II, and Gold I. Gold I is the highest division in the Gold category. With the introduction of ranked leagues, all players start in the Bronze IV division, but going forward, the starting position will be determined in a special way if the player moved up in the leaderboard in the previous series.

Account

Players take places in the rating table according to the established scoring system. An attempt has been made to make it clear so that you can see exactly what you need to move to the next category. The score is kept using Ranking Points (RP) and a player's place in the table goes up and down over the course of the season.

To play a ranked match, you need to spend a certain amount of rating points, which depends on the category:

• Matches in the Bronze category are free.
• Matches in the Silver category are worth 1 RP.
• Matches in the Gold category are worth 2 RP.
• Matches in the Platinum category cost 3 RP.
• Matches in the Diamond category are worth 4 RP.
• Matches in the Apex Predator category cost 5 RP.

Players earn ranking points during the match. The number of points depends on the performance of the players. For each kill, the player receives 1 RP, up to a maximum of 5 RP per match. If a player is among the top 10 players in the match, he receives 2 RP. If he gets into the top five, he gets 4 RP. The reward for getting into the top three is 7 RP. 12 ROs are awarded for first place. Placement points are not cumulative, meaning if a player finishes a match in the top 4, they will receive 6 RPs instead of 10 as they would if top 5 and top 17 points were added together. Thus, you can get no more than XNUMX RP per match, not counting the participation fee.

Play with friends

To play in ranked leagues, a player must reach level 10. If a player queues up in a lobby with their friends, the system will match against the highest ranked player in that lobby, but each player will pay for the match according to their current rank. This way you can avoid the situation when strong players "drag" their friends with lower ranks. If you are playing in the Bronze III division and are queuing up with a player from the Diamond II division, be prepared for the match to be incredibly difficult for you.

Moving in the leaderboard

At the start of Ranked Leagues, all players start in the Bronze category and will then move up and down within the category as they gain points. So far, only moving from a lower category to a higher one is possible, but not vice versa. If you manage to get into the Platinum IV division, you will not be demoted to Gold I in the current series, no matter how many matches you lose. However, within a category, players can move both ways across divisions. If you played in the Gold II division, but your RP meter dropped below 380, you will be promoted to the Gold III division. Downgrading may need to be adjusted in the future, depending on the data that comes out of the first series.

The higher the category, the more difficult the matches. We expect the majority of players to reach their actual skill level and stabilize towards the end of the first series.

Awards

Ultimately, there is no better reward in the ranking system than recognition of your excellence and rank. However, we want to reward everyone who took the time to compete against other players within the table. Each player will receive an emblem with a rank in series 1, depending on which category they will be in at the end of the series. The developers will continue to work on other rewards that will allow players to showcase their achievements. We'll talk more about them later in Season 2.

Penalty

It is believed that ranked games are events with high rewards, but also high risks. This means players in Ranked Mode need to take a more responsible approach to their matches, playing at full strength, even when things seem to be very bad.

Those who leave their teammates will face penalties during matchmaking in regular and ranked matches. The penalized player will not be able to join the match for some time. The more often he left ranked matches prematurely, the longer the ban will last. Leaving prematurely is considered leaving a match before it is over for you, including during character selection, or while the player is still alive, or if you died, but teammates can still revive you.

For the first violation, a five-minute ban is introduced. With subsequent violations, its duration will increase up to one week.

Forgiveness for losing

Just like Elite games, Ranked Matches will have loss forgiveness. Forgiveness for a loss is the reset of all potentially lost rating points in a match. For example, if you end a Diamond match in last place with 2 kills, you would normally lose 4 RP (2 RP you spent playing a Diamond match and 2 RP gained from kills, so your final score would be -1 RO). But if you apply loss forgiveness, you will not lose points. However, it only works if you are at a loss at the end of the match. If, for example, you had five kills and a loss forgiveness was applied, you would still only get XNUMX RP in the end.

Loss forgiveness applies if your teammate leaves the game prematurely, or if you leave the game through no fault of your own, such as client errors. At the beginning of the series, gamedevs plan to be more lenient, but will closely monitor the actions of the players. If someone is found to be abusing loss forgiveness, stricter rules will be set.

Matchmaking Changes

Matchmaking system data will be constantly monitored and changes will be made promptly. This way it will be clear how long it takes to select opponents from the same category, what should be the difference in the ranks of the players participating in the match, etc. We will update the news as they appear in our articles.

This is the plan for the first series of ranked leagues Apex Legends. As with all things Apex, there will be learning as you play, so you can expect improvements to the system over time. We're sure to learn a lot as you begin your climb up the leaderboard.