- The mid-season split in Apex Legends is being removed and rank resets will happen at the end of a season.
- In Season 17 and on everyone's rank will be reset to rookie and 10 provisional ‘placement’ matches will determine your rank.
- Ranked Points are being replaced by Ladder Points. Placement will determine your points with eliminations, rating and skill bonuses further boosting it.
Apex Legends Season 17 is shaking up a whole lot and adding in tons of new content for players, including massive changes to Ranked Play. It’s not the first time Apex Legends has taken player feedback on the ranked system as some may remember Rank Reloaded in Season 13 Saviors. These new ranked changes are so massive, they eclipse even the changes we saw in Saviors.
What are the Apex Legends Ranked Changes?
The developers call the changes they’re making to Ranked Mode a foundational shift with an overhaul to the scoring system and critical changes to the matchmaking system. The biggest change players will notice is that Ranked Points are now being changed to Ladder Points and will be consistent across all ranks.
The entry-level for Ranked is also being increased from level 20 to level 50 in hopes of curbing the smurfing issue as well as slowing down cheaters who make new accounts. Kills will remain uncapped as they have been, but you’ll only earn LP (Ladder Points) for unique kills and assists.
This unique kill change is intended to address high-level cheaters who collude with another team to respawn one another over and over again to farm kills. It’s unclear if that means killing an enemy who legitimately escapes and respawns their teammate will yield no LP or reduced LP in some way.
The ranked map rotation for Apex Legends Season 17 Ranked will be Kings Canyon, World’s Edge and Olympus.
No More Ranked Splits
One of the first major changes players will notice is that the ranked season will no longer be split in two. Each ranked system will run for the entire duration of the season, around 90 days.
One of the issues that may arise is that ranked splits helped with keeping players engaged. With some of the bigger streamers able to do solo bronze to predator challenges in the span of a single weekend, it doesn’t take 90 days for them to reach their rank. Ranked splits at least gave them a small reason to jump back into playing halfway through the season.
Besides Predators who want to keep their top rank, what keeps other high-ranking players engaged in ranked when they feel they’ve hit a ceiling and start to burn out on the game?
Provisional Matches
Former Arena Players will recognize the next big change to ranked as Apex Legends is introducing provisional matches. At the start of a season, every player will be reset to rookie and must play in 10 Provisional Matches. Based on your placement results and your skill, you’ll be placed in an appropriate ranking. This isn’t a new system and is used by most other competitive FPS games, otherwise known as placement matches.
As you complete these provisional matches, you'll be updated after each game with an estimated rank based on your performance so far.
This should help with the issue of high-rank players taking short breaks and coming back to be in silver or gold lobbies despite being diamond, masters or predators.
Provisional matches are also unique in that your losses will be fully mitigated while your gains will be significantly magnified in order to help place you in the correct rank.
New Ranked Scoring System
The next major change in Apex Legends Season 17's ranked update is the removal of Ranked Points (RP) for Ladder Points (LP). They function similar to one another in that as you win, you gain points and go up in rank.
But Ladder Points are based entirely on your placement in a match. If you place in 1st through 10th place you'll earn Ladder Points. If you place in 11th through 20th, you'll lose Ladder Points.
Your points will be further boosted based on three bonus categories: Eliminations, Ratings, and Skill Bonuses.
Eliminations will be given whenever your team eliminates another player. This will be individually calculated and killing the same player multiple times will not count. In addition, the assist timer has been drastically increased from 15 seconds to 30 seconds. Eliminations, assists and participation will all still count towards calculating your Elimination bonus.
A Rating Bonus is given when your current Ladder Points or Rank is greatly outperformed by your hidden Matchmaking Rating. The better you do, the more points you get.
Finally, the Skill Bonuses are applied when you interact with a stronger opponent and perform well in the match. Leading you to gain more points when you overcome an unfavorable match.
Entry costs have also been standardized across all ranks. Instead of an entry cost that grows as you increase your rank, the entry cost will be 35 LP regardless of your rank. If you can attain at least 10th place, you'll gain LP. This is to take some of the focus on getting kills and put it more on surviving, which is the main objective to win in a battle royale.
Ranked Structure
With the removal of the mid-season split, the pacing of ranked progression needed to be adjusted as well. Players will notice that every division (Gold IV, Gold III, Gold II, Gold I, ect.) only requires 1000 LP to advance to the next rank.
Promotion bonuses and tier demotions have been adjusted accordingly. It's also now possible to demote into the Rookie Rank.
More from Season 17 Arsenal
For more information on Apex Legends Season 17 Arsenal, you can check out the patch notes. We also have more information on the newest Legend Ballistic, updated map changes to World’s Edge, a revamped and upgraded firing range, the new weapon mastery system, a new survival item the evac tower and more.
Apex Legend’s Season 17 Arsenal launches on May 9th.
