Greetings from your Apex Legends™ Ranked designers. We’re back again to talk about Ranked Leagues Series 4 for Apex Legends. As usual, we’ll take a look at our goals, talk about some results, and detail how Ranked Leagues will work when Season 5 - Fortune’s Favor launches.

TL;DR

• Splits are working well. Staying with ~6 weeks of ranked play before a reset
• Tier and Apex Predator separation worked as intended.
• reset gave a good incentive to keep playing.
• Switching maps mid season helped keep things interesting. Will persist.

Series 3 Results

Let’s quickly review our goals for Ranked and comment a bit on some of the Series 3 performance results. Ranked is feeling pretty consistent from season to season, but we will keep tuning things as needed!

• Create a True Measure of Skill in Apex Legends
          As of April 23rd we have the following distribution among players who played more than 5 hours of Ranked (versus last Series):
  • 17.54% Bronze (3.9%)
  • 27.2% Silver (29.1%)
  • 33.72% Gold (35.3%)
  • 18.82% Platinum (23.6%)
  • 2.51% Diamond (7.1%)
  • 0.2% Master & Apex Predator (0.2%)
    Remember that Apex Predator is simply the top 500 per platform of players in the top pool. This second split seems to have left many more players in Bronze, even when filtering out players who played less than 5 hours. But the breakdown of higher tier players is feeling like a more appropriate skill distribution.
    
• Reward competitive players for the time they invest in Apex Legends
          Last series we introduced the concept of limited time dive trails as cosmetic rewards. This continues to feel like the right approach, as the real reward for ranked play is the ranking you earn yourself. We’ll continue to track how dive trails are being used and report more next season.
• Ensure competitive integrity through skill-based matchmaking
          RP based Matchmaking continues to create the high pressure climb near the top of each division. This is working as intended, and will persist.
• Let top-tier Apex Legends players compete at the highest levels of skill
          Master Tier successfully let us keep only the best players in the world in the Apex Predator tier. We’re happy with the competition this drives and also the prestige that earning (and keeping) Apex Predator now connotes.

Series 3 Rewards

Here’s a preview of the Series 3 ranked rewards you’ll be earning when the Season changes.

What’s Not Changing in Series 4

Ranked Series Splits

We won’t see any changes to the ranked split system. Changing maps, and the soft RP reset both performed well and kept things interesting over the whole season. As with last season, we’ll change maps around midway through the Series. We’ll be starting with King’s Canyon, then moving to World’s Edge with the planned split reset on June 30.

Scoring, Entry RP Cost, Assists

These systems are all feeling pretty solid now, so we’ll be leaving them alone and keeping an eye on ladder progression throughout the next Series.

A Review of Loss Forgiveness

We’ve seen a lot of questions around Loss Forgiveness in the past couple seasons, so we wanted to take this opportunity to go into more detail about how it works.

As a quick summary, if you’re wondering if you’re eligible for loss forgiveness in a match, you can bring up the leave match menu before you’ve been eliminated. If it says this:

you are free to leave.

If you see either of these however:

you will get an abandon penalty if you choose to leave.

For more details on what grants loss forgiveness, here’s a breakdown of the rules involved:

Definitions

Loss Forgiveness: A state we grant you where any RP losses you might have are zeroed out. For example, in a Diamond match where you came in last place but had two kills, you would normally have a -28 adjustment to your RP (-48 from the Diamond entry cost, +20 for kills, for a net loss of -28). With loss forgiveness, however, you would have a net loss adjusted to 0. However, this will only apply if you stand to lose RP from the match – if you had five kills and loss forgiveness, your RP would still be net +2.

Abandon: Leaving a match before it is over for you, while you do not have loss forgiveness. "Before it is over for you" is defined as the player is still able to play, e.g. you are still alive, or you are dead but waiting to be respawned etc. A notable exception to this is if your banner has been picked up and you have not respawned within 2 and a half minutes, you will not be considered abandoning if you leave.

Abandon Penalty: The normal penalty for an abandon that isn't forgiven is 1. zeroing out all gains a player would have had in the match, 2. An additional penalty RP cost equal to the entry cost for the player. 3. A timer placed on you before you can start matchmaking again. Currently this is set to a flat 10 minutes.

Expected quit: Leaving the match through the game menus with the option "Leave match". Unexpected quits are everything else, e.g. game errors, leaving via console system menus, your Internet connection being disrupted, etc.

Granting of Loss Forgiveness

We grant players loss forgiveness:

1. When their matchmade teammates abandon the game (i.e. if your party mates abandon you do not get loss forgiveness)
2. When you get to the start of the drop sequence and you never had 3 teammates.
3. When you have an unexpected quit. There are limits to how often we give this, see the next section for details.

Please note that there is a potential exception for point 2: If a player A joins the server, and player B joins player A's team, but before B finishes loading in player A disconnects. If a player C then joins player B's team, from the server's perspective players B and C have had a full squad, thus player A leaving doesn't necessarily give them loss forgiveness, especially if A was a party mate of B.

Loss Forgiveness for Unexpected Quits

The first time in a Ranked Series a player gets an unexpected quit that might be considered an abandon (e.g. your Internet went out, etc), we give you loss forgiveness.

The second time onwards an unexpected quit occurs, we ask: has the player had an unexpected quit that might be considered an abandon in the past 24 hours?" If not, free loss forgiveness is granted. If the answer is yes however, we give loss forgiveness, but count that as a "used forgiveness abandon".

 A player is limited to 3 used forgiveness abandons in a Series. Once the limit is used, all further unexpected quits that might be considered an abandon are treated as an abandon and penalized appropriately (Zeroed out RP gain, RP penalty, matchmaking penalty time). This also means we disregard the free abandon every 24 hour period mentioned above.

 Every time a player gets a forgiven abandon, used or not, we display a message in the lobby:

When a player has hit 3 used forgiveness abandons, we display a different message:

Example Scenarios

That was a very long explanation of loss forgiveness, but let’s try and simplify it by walking through some common examples:

Scenario 1: You partied up with your friend and went into Ranked. Your friend's internet went out in the middle of the match. What happens?

Answer: Party mates leaving do not give you loss forgiveness, hence if you leave immediately you will be given an abandon penalty.

Scenario 2: In scenario 1, after your friend disconnected, the third person in your group left immediately. What happens?

Answer: The third member on your squad was not in your party, his leaving gives you loss forgiveness.

Scenario 3: You joined into a ranked match by yourself but did not get any other teammates. You leave. What happens?

Answer: It depends on when you leave. Even past character selection we will try to find teammates for you. If you leave after the drop sequence has begun, you will be given loss forgiveness. If you leave before that however, you will be given an abandon penalty.

Introducing Reconnect

As we work on stability and systems like Loss Forgiveness that help make it more forgiving to play ranked and really focus on your climb, we wanted to offer even more ways to recover from crashes or internet outages. We’re happy to announce that reconnect is coming in Season 5. If you get disconnected due to internet weather, a quick brownout, or a crash in the game - you can now just restart and if the session is still ongoing you will reload right back into the session. We hope this helps get you back in the game quickly and easily to keep earning that RP. Expect more details in the final patch notes.

Final Words

We’ll continue to evaluate and improve Ranked Leagues, but we’re happy with the progress so far. A big thanks to all the players that grind the ladder and show us what high skill games of Apex Legends really look like.

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