Apex Legends announces changes to Ranked with upcoming season 17 Arsenal

In its latest blog, Respawn Entertainment has announced a variety of changes that will make their way to Apex Legends with the arrival of Season 17: Arsenal. The community has been requesting these changes over the past few seasons to improve the competitive integrity of the game. The developer claims that many more improvements will make their way to the title in the future.

This article takes a look at the changes that are coming in the next season of Apex Legends.

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Ranked changes in Apex Legends: New scoring system, ladder points, changed ranked structure, and more

Previously, the Ranked structure in Season 12 of Apex Legends was significantly overhauled. The changes were met with a lot of excitement from pro players, but casual fans were not happy.

In its blog post, Respawn Entertainment stated that the upcoming changes to Ranked have two main objectives:

1. Evolving matchmaking to enable consistently competitive matches instead of one-sided ones.
2. Adjusting the scoring system to focus on the essence of playing the battle-royale game as a team.

The systematic order of the changes that will be implemented shows a lot of promise for the entire community's experience in the Ranked playlist. To achieve these goals, the following key changes have been incorporated in the upcoming Season of Apex Legends.

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Consistently competitive matches

The previous matchmaking algorithm for ranked matches grouped players from a certain rank and specific Ranked Points (RP) range. This, however, was not an accurate estimate of players' skills and was not helpful in making matches fair for everyone.

The new matchmaking algorithm for Season 17: Arsenal is primarily focused on grouping players in Ranked based on a hidden MMR. The new matchmaker values match fairness more than its predecessor. Players can, however, experience slightly longer queue times than usual.

The latest system prioritizes creating matches with people in similar party builds. However, this is not exactly feasible in a 60-player battle royale. To account for the disparity between pre-made squads and other teams, small advantages will be added to the disadvantageous team to ensure fairness.

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New scoring system

The previous iteration of Ranked Points (RP) in Apex Legends Ranked has been overhauled to incorporate Ladder Points (LP). The new scoring system revolves around Bonuses that amplify players' LP gains and mitigate their LP losses. The sole focus of the current system is the prioritization of placements in the game.

The bonuses that are granted to players have to be earned and are not guaranteed. Here are the three major groups of bonuses coming in Season 17 of Apex Legends:

1. Elimination Bonus: These are awarded when the players' team eliminates other players. The bonus is individually calculated, and multiple eliminations against the same players are discarded.
2. Rating Bonus: These are awarded to players when their hidden MMR outperforms their LP.
3. Skill Bonus: These are awarded when players' teams perform exceptionally against unfavorable opponents or in unfavorable matches.

Furthermore, harsh entry costs have been filtered out, and scaling entry costs are no longer necessary with the MMR system in Apex Legends. The new entry will cost all players, disregarding their ranks, just a mere 35 LP.

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Ranked Structure

The previous system of Ranked splits has been removed. The player's rank will now reset with the onset of a new season. The following are the changes that have been made to the structure:

1. Division width between ranks now set at 1000LP per division.
2. Promotion Bonus for every rank has been reduced from 300 to 250 LP
3. Demotion penalty has been reduced from being half the points of the division to 150 LP
4. Players can now be demoted to Rookie rank
5. Ranked reset will fully reset your progress back to 0 LP
6. The minimum requirement to play Ranked has been increased from Level 20 to Level 50.

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Players can experience all these changes when the new season of Apex Legends drops on May 9, 2023.