Quick Thoughts 16.1
Mel
Riot Emizery revealed some of the upcoming Mel changes about to hit the rift in 16.3, which were a response to a lot of your feedback on her current state.
The main change is removing her immunity on W. Have seen a lot of concerns about this causing her to lose her identity.
She will still have her reflect and we believe that is one of the core pieces that remains intact ; it will just be more necessary for her to use it well to succeed.
We'll be monitoring closely and see if we need to follow up with any power adjustments.
Ranked Thoughts
We've been monitoring a lot of things closely with the rollout of the new Season.
We're seeing Challenger and GM LP requirements slowly drift up and start to stabilize as more people start their climbs, as well as the tops of the ladder and LP gains flattening out.
Start of season for apex tiers is always going to be a bit chaotic as people start to separate themselves out of the Apex reset (which clumps a lot of apex players at the beginning to give more of a fair playing field).
It appears that many players in those ranges are stabilizing at -20 and capping out around 2k LP which is intended.
We are about to do a wave of boosting and hitchhiking bans that number ~10k, we will be reverting the ranks of these players, punishing the boostees of the players and stripping the ranked rewards of those involved. This wave is larger than usual because of end of season/start of season boosting. Please don't boost, it's really not worth it and we're going to catch you eventually.
We've also been monitoring duo queue, especially at high MMR. So far we're pretty happy with the balance overall, it seems roughly balanced, for the most part, but we'll continue to do fine tuning there.
As we mentioned in the Season Start blog, the size of Iron has been reduced this Season and as a result there's been some intentional upward shift in the rest of the ranks. We want iron and low bronze to better reflect the skill level of newer players to the game and not be a permanent resting home for tenured league players, as there's not really another place for newer players to start and climb from.
You also might have noticed that iron is smaller because we've been removing and sweeping a lot of the botted (and subsequently intentionally deranked) accounts from the ladder. This is an ongoing initiative that we're going to keep pushing on.
Finally on aegis, dodging and time to game, the marked improvements around dodges and their effect on queue times have stayed pretty consistent.
We're in the process of evaluating Mastery ranks required for aegis grants and whether we should bump up the requirements. We've also been fine tuning what performances are required to receive what ranks. Nothing to share back just yet, but something that we're monitoring.
As far as aegis for voluntarily playing priority roles goes, we're likely going to bump the rate up a bit.
Players get autofilled a lot less than you'd expect, especially for average play, so it will still be pretty rare to get priority role aegises (think 1 in 30-60 games depending on region, rank). It's quite close to the autofill rate in most regions, but still a bit lower on average.
Overall, after some early season instability, most of the systems are playing out as we expect.
We still intend to ship better matchmaking of offroles and autofills in the coming patches, but we're finalizing a bunch of the details on those. We want to make sure it plays out as we expect before it hits live servers.
In the meantime, happy climbing and hope you're all able to achieve your ranked goals this season.