/dev: The Return of Ranked 5s

Hey everyone. As we talked about in today’s Dev Update, we’re experimenting with an old (new?) Ranked queue called Ranked 5s but with a bit of a twist.

Before we get into what you can expect, we want to talk a little bit about why we’re re-introducing it.

We think competitive League is at its best in a team environment. Some of our most memorable moments in gaming have been playing at local tournaments in PC cafes, competing in the Riot Rumble tournament, and organizing our friends and family to get together, compete, and connect. When you get 5 people working together to achieve a shared goal, it’s peak. And so…

Ranked 5s are coming back!

Ranked 5s... What are they?

If you’ve been playing for a while, hearing “Ranked 5s” may feel like a blast from the past. For those of you who haven’t played Ranked 5s before, it’s a Summoner’s Rift queue with premade groups of five players and individual ranks. For those of you who wonder why it ever left, the previous iteration of this queue was sunset due to issues with consistently matching teams of similar skills, leading to incredibly long queue times. Since then, we’ve made improvements to matchmaking that make us believe that we can deliver an experience that many of you have missed and would be excited to have back.

So TL;DR: We’re bringing back Ranked 5s with a few tweaks to provide better matchmaking and queue times.

What’s New

The first change we’re making is that you don’t need the same team to queue up every time. It can be really hard to get the same group together consistently. In this iteration of Ranked 5s, you’ll be able to queue with any group of friends, meaning there aren’t set teams. This should help alleviate the issue we previously saw with teams being unavailable to play more often than not, and it will allow players with wider social circles to play with whoever is available instead of locking them into rosters (yes, whoever—more on that below).

The second change we’re making is that you can queue with any of your friends, regardless of your ranks. We want this to be a queue where friends can play together, and we believe that the joy of playing with your friends is more important than tightly-constrained skill evaluation. We have built in a number of mechanisms to balance out large individual skill disparities within teams with the goal of providing more evenly-matched experiences to teams that have players at both the top and bottom ends of the overall skill distribution. 

The third change we’re making is that this version of Ranked 5s will be available only at set times on weekends. This is aimed at getting people who are interested in Ranked 5s to show up at the same time, which we expect will increase the number of teams queuing, which will help us get both better matchmaking and queue times

• North America: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM CDT
• EU West: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM CEST
• EUNE: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM CEST
• Latin America North: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM EDT
• Latin America South: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM CLT
• Brazil: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM BRT
• Oceania: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM AEST
• Southeast Asia: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM SGT
• Middle East: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM AST
• Russia: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM CEST
• Korea: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM KST
• Japan: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM JST
• Taiwan: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM CST
• Vietnam: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM ICT
• Turkey: 9:00 PM – 1:00 AM TRT

The last change we have in store from the previous run of Ranked 5s is that we’ll be using Tournament Draft (3 bans, 3 picks, 2 bans, 2 picks) instead of standard Ranked draft for picks and bans. We want to encourage teams to strategize together, and we expect that Tournament Draft will give Ranked 5s teams new ways to approach champ select in highly coordinated ways, whether that’s protecting counterpicks or changing up your strategy altogether in response to new information or a new approach from your opponents.

Finally, we expect that some of you have concerns about teams with large individual skill disparities from a game integrity and smurfing perspective. Our smurfing and boosting detections have come a long way since the last time Ranked 5s existed. We’ve been successful in cracking down on “one Challenger account, four Diamond accounts with Challenger players on them” Flex queue boosting schemes, and we expect to apply those detections to Ranked 5s as well. As always, we’ll monitor games to see how things pan out.

Try ‘Em Out!

As Pabro and Meddler said, we’re experimenting with Ranked 5s. This isn’t set in stone. We expect that the queue will evolve over time. So please, give us your feedback on how it feels, and tell us if there’s anything you think is missing. To sweeten the deal, we’ll be adding an Icon for everyone, regardless of your rank, as well as a unique banner that reflects your peak rank if you hit Gold or above.

So time to text the squad and tell ‘em to queue up.

See you on the Rift.