Announcing Apex Legends Ranked Season 8

Hello Legends! Today we’re going to take a look at the results from Season 7 and talk about some bigger adjustments we’re making for Ranked Leagues when Season 8: Mayhem launches. We think you’ll like some of our latest improvements. Read on!

As of 1/21/2021, we have the following distribution among players in Split 2 who played more than 5 hours of Ranked (versus Season 6):

• 16.35% Bronze (17.76%)
• 23.86% Silver (26.23%)
• 32.09% Gold (36.25%)
• 23.13% Platinum (17.75%)
• 4.37% Diamond (1.89%)
• 0.20% Master & Apex Predator (0.12%)

In Season 7 we saw higher player counts and more playtime than previous seasons. This resulted in a healthy spread of players across all ranked tiers, with a notable increase to population in Platinum and higher tiers. We’re seeing ranked matches taking between 30% and 40% of all games played depending on time of day, region, limited time mode availability, and time since the last reset.

A consistent and on-going goal for the Apex Ranked team is to ensure competitive integrity through skill-based matchmaking. For Season 8, we are taking a bigger swing at some of our goals, while taking into account a lot of feedback from the community.

Some of these goals for Season 8 are:

• Create a healthier top end in Diamond+. Diamond, Master and Predators are reserved for the best of the best. We don’t want to change that. But, we do want these players competing against more players of similar skill, more often. In previous seasons, the player pool in Diamond+ was too small to consistently provide fair matches, so we aim to improve this by providing more opportunities for good players to earn RP.
• Improve match quality for ranked matches. This means we are aiming to fill most, if not all, of players in your Ranked match with players in the same rank tier. This may cause slightly longer queue times, but more competitively fair matches. We think this is worth it, and we’ll monitor queue times and sentiment closely around these changes.

Here’s the details of changes to the RP system designed to support these goals:

• Earn placement RP earlier in a match
  • RP rewards begin at placement 13 instead of 10 in a match.
• Kill/Assist count has been raised to 6
  • Earn RP for more of your kills and assists in a given match.
  • This is a slight nudge to give really good players a slightly faster trip back to their competitive rank, while giving our top tier players more ways to pull ahead of the pack in the Predator ranks.
• Assist Threshold Increased to 10 seconds
  • Earn assists for up to 10 seconds (up from 7.5 seconds) after dealing damage to a target that is killed by someone else.
• Predator has been increased to the top 750 players
  • Allowing more players to enter predator should improve queue times while remaining an exclusive tier for the highest levels of play.
• Matchmaking Tightening
  • Players below Diamond will matchmake much more often within their own Ranks.

Finally, for Season 8 onwards, we’re excited to announce that Diamond Skydive Trails will be making a return as a ranked reward!

We always want to reward competitive players for the time you invest in Apex Legends and we hope accelerating the earnable RP will allow you to climb a little higher or give you the motivation to push for that next tier.

Kings Canyon crashes back into the scene for the first split which ends March 23rd, 2021. The second split will take us back to Olympus for the remainder of the Season.

World’s Edge is taking a break from ranked play but will return in a later season.

Here’s a preview of all the Season 7 ranked rewards you’ll be earning when the Season swaps over:

We’ll keep an eye on these adjustments and the impact they have on the ranked progression and health within the tiers. Thanks for playing and good luck out there, Legends!

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