Here’s a TLDR on what the developers feedback for ranked in Season 17.

• Overly Generous Ladder Points (LP): Arsenal’s LP tuning was intended to be generous, but not this generous. Its current tuning is causing a series of cascading issues with the rest of the Ranked system. We are tightening the amount of LP awarded and bonuses included for Season 18.
• Bugs: We love to hate them. They are contributing to the tuning problem and we’re feeling confident about our upcoming fixes.
• Future Changes: Season 18 will focus on refining Ranked tuning and stability. We’re going to take a deep breath and take the time needed to prepare for an even tighter and more competitive Ranked system.

Dive trails will be removed from Season 18 onwards. Instead, players will get an animated Banner Frame and Badge to show off their achievements.

According to Chris Cleroux, the Lead Game Designer of Apex Legends, Dive trails were designed to show off rank skills, but instead its given the player a bullseye on their backs.

Season 18 Focus

BONUSES

In Season 17, when a player’s ranking is much higher than their Matchmaking Rating (MMR), the bonus system stops giving bonuses to correct the rank gradually. The generous LP caused some players to have inflated rankings compared to their MMR, leading to an early “no bonus” state. In extreme cases, ranks were significantly higher than MMR, overshadowing all bonuses. Future adjustments will make this state harder to reach.

For the average player to receive bonuses again, they need to actively defeat multiple squads and perform well to raise their MMR.

The developers see that it it feels bad to perform well and not see any bonuses. Therefore, there will be 2 changes in Season 18:

1. Adding a minimum elimination bonus based on a player’s MMR, which won’t be withheld.
2. Slightly increasing the elimination bonus.

RANK DISTRIBUTION

The increase in Masters players is due to bugs and overly generous LP tuning. The LP distribution is skewed to the right, leading to an excessive number of Masters players, as shown in the graph below.

In Season 18, this will be the new changes:

1. Decreasing LP gains per match to address the shift in ranking distribution.
2. Introducing a ruleset for Diamond+ players to address the high concentration of players at higher ranks. This will involve increased stakes and LP losses, and reduced rating bonuses and loss mitigations.

By implementing these solutions, the pace to Masters for the average player will slow down, leading to more accurate matchmaking and higher-quality matches, especially in Diamond+ ranks.

Question: For rank, since the LP system below diamond is the same, you can almost always get to diamond, if you put in the time, wouldnt it just shift the majority of players from masters to diamond?
We are focusing on Diamond for this season and putting the pressure on Diamond+ players.

The team has confirmed that they are working on making sure people aren’t going to bunch up like in S17 and are ready to react if it happens this time.

We’ve noticed a particular pattern in both Ranked and ALGS levels: teams stay outside of the ring and delay interacting with other teams to gain points. Hiding and avoiding firefights isn’t a rewarding way to play Apex Legends. Season 18 has some updates to target this, and more are coming in future seasons to address the core gameplay issues around inactivity and avoidant playstyles. – APEX LEGENDS: JULY 2023 RANKED DEV BLOG

In order to counter this, Season 18 will bring about these changes:

• Adjusting ring timings to increase mid-game encounters
• Ring damage tuning to enforce playing inside the ring
• Fixed a number of “ratting” spots with more fixes to come

MATCHMAKING

When a player’s LP ranking exceeds their MMR equivalent, the devs use the ranking (LP) instead of MMR for matchmaking. For instance, if a Gold MMR player has a Diamond LP ranking, they will be matched into a Diamond lobby. This ensures that MMR and LP are connected and help guide players to their accurate rank. If players succeed in these challenging matchmaking situations, they can continue climbing. However, due to the overly generous LP tuning, many players have inflated LP compared to their MMR, causing lower-skilled players to be matched in higher rank lobbies.

In Arsenal, players have been matched with other players of varying skills, even at the highest ranks, which was unintentional and led to inconsistent match experiences.

Season 18’s will be about updating the matchmaking to handle players who actively challenge their MMR. This will ensure that players get competitively challenging matches that align with their current ranking.

During matchmaking, the system aims to find players with similar MMR (skill level). The longer it searches, the closer the match should be. The goal is to provide exciting and challenging matches. However, waiting forever for a match isn’t enjoyable either. When there aren’t enough exact MMR matches available, the system continues searching for a limited time and then starts the match with the closest MMR players it can find. At the extreme end of very high skill, matchmaking is struggling, leading to unfair matches with a wide MMR range.

The main focus in Season 18 is to fix a bug that has been causing inconsistent high-end match experiences. We’ve identified the root cause and are actively working on a solution.

For the rest of the player population, matchmaking is stable, and players are consistently being matched with others who have similar MMR values.