Announcing Apex Legends Ranked Season 6

Hello once again from your Apex Legends™ Ranked designers. We’re back to talk about Ranked Leagues Season 6 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 6 - Boosted launches.

• “Series” terminology retired, Ranked Leagues will use “Season” going forward.
• Mid-season Splits with resets continue to give good incentives for sustained play.

When we first started planning Ranked, we were planning for Ranked to eventually run on a different cadence from a Season.This is a common practice in other games, and has benefits from a development standpoint as well. Thus, we decided to introduce Ranked with a “Series” numbering to make it consistent when we switched. Over time however, we’ve appreciated the benefits of this current cadence and are now committing to having Ranked run for the same length of time as a Season. As such, we are retiring the “Series” terminology. Existing Ranked rewards have all had their names updated to reflect the changes. This should get rid of the confusion arising from the one-off numbering differences for Ranked Series and Seasons!

Let’s quickly review our goals for Ranked and comment a bit on some of the Season 5 performance results. By now we’ve settled into a fairly stable distribution, and while we’re generally happy with the results, we will continue to keep tracking the results and making changes where we see potential for improvement.

• Create a true measure of skill in Apex Legends
  As of August 13th, we have the following distribution among players in Split 2 who played more than 5 hours of Ranked (versus last Season):
  • 16.21% Bronze (17.51%)
  • 22.83% Silver (27.2%)
  • 32.31% Gold (33.7%)
  • 23.96% Platinum (18.82%)
  • 4.37% Diamond (2.51%)
  • 0.31% Master & Apex Predator (0.2%)

  There’s been a slight but noticeable increase in players in the higher tiers. Overall we are pleased with the distribution of players in this fashion and hope players are enjoying the climb through the Ranks every Season. 

• Reward competitive players for the time they invest in Apex Legends
  Dive Trails continue to be a highly sought-after cosmetic item that allow players at the top to visually distinguish themselves. This Season sees the first time that Trails from a previous Ranked Season will expire, but if you missed the chance to earn the Season 4 Trail, fear not, we plan to let players have a chance to earn it again in Season 8.
• Ensure competitive integrity through skill-based matchmaking
  RP based Matchmaking continues to group players of similar skill together for close matches. From our perspective this is working well, but we are aware of the feedback about how bad it feels when players are matched against players they think are far above them in terms of skill. We are currently considering changes to improve the situation, see sections below for details.
• Let top-tier Apex Legends players compete at the highest levels of skill
  The introduction of Master Tier has been a success, and we are happy with how only the most consistently successful players in the world can maintain being in Apex Predator Tier.

Here’s a preview of the Season 5 ranked rewards you’ll be earning when the Season changes.

Mid-Season Splits have proven to be very engaging for players, so we’ll continue with them this Season. We’ll be starting with World’s Edge, then moving to Kings Canyon, with the planned split reset on September 29th.

Since the introduction of Ranked Leagues, one of the most persistent critiques we’ve had of the system is that players feel like they are often matched up against players far above their Rank. This experience can be very frustrating. Our data shows this doesn’t happen very often - for example, only 3% of all matches for all Platinum players in Apex Legends have them going up against a Master or Apex Predator. For Platinum players that might be 3% too much, and we certainly understand their frustration when it happens, but since we have to balance queue times and latency for all players involved, this is a situation we are unable to ever realistically eliminate completely. With that said however - we are looking into exciting changes for future Seasons to help alleviate this issue. We need a little more time to work out the details, but we’ll share details of the system when we are ready to do so.

We’ll continue to evaluate and improve Ranked Leagues, but all in all we’re happy with the progress so far. Apex Legends’ Ranked system is built to encourage competitive play at all skill levels. This means that Ranked is not just for the pro players and content creators out there, it is also for anyone who wants to take the game seriously. It is for all players who want to get better at the game. It is for the hardcore grinders and the weekend warriors alike. We hope to keep making Ranked play better for you all.

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