League of Legends: The Pros and Cons of Playing Ranked at the Start of Season 10
By Josh Tyler
Season 10 is upon us and the League of Legends ranked ladder will be reset soon. We discuss if it’s worth it to play during these first few days.
The first few days of a new League of Legends season are always chaotic, with players who ignored all the changes during the preseason flooding the queues, MMR resets, wonky LP gains and losses, and failed initiatives like positional ranks. With all this craziness, a lot of players wonder if they would be better off leaving ranked untouched until the ladder settles and Riot fixes whatever calamity has developed. With Season 10 now slated to begin on January 10 (nice little bit of poetry there Riot), those questions are returning.
If you’re confused about what we mean, on January 10 there will be a complete reset of the League of Legends ranked ladder (for both solo and flex queues). Whatever rank you had last year will be gone and you’ll have to re-do your eight placement games to get a new rank to start the season.
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This rank will be artificially lower than it was in Season 9 both because Riot wants to make sure that you “earned” your rank last season and to get it closer to your “reset” hidden ranking, called MMR. Everyone’s reset MMR will have them placed halfway between where their MMR was last season and 1200 “elo,” the approximate elo of low-to-mid Silver (for a full breakdown of the formula, check out this post by Tryharder.gg). Players who were Plat and above will have their ranks reset to Plat IV, which is the highest rank anyone can be placed at to start the new season.
This means that the first few weeks of Season 10 will have a lot of matches with players of varying reset MMRs who might have been much higher or lower than the other players in the game. The start of the season is a time where players generally see hugely disparate LP gains and losses (something Riot has tried to alleviate) and some frustrating matchmaking issues. So is it worth it for you to play ranked at the start of Season 10?