Riot to remove promotional games and add banning phase to Wild Rift ranked, in season 3

Wild Rift's season three will kick start with Patch 2.4 soon, where ranked play is set to receive a big change as promotional games will be removed along with the addition of a banning phase.

Riot recently shared details on their plans through a blog post, clarifying the key reasons behind the removal of the promotional games. According to Wild Rift's principal game designer Josh “Nextdoor” Menke,

“After comparing the competitive intent of Promotion Matches against engagement skill data, we found that they were doing more harm than good for players. In the lower ranks, we saw that promotion losses were more likely than usual to cause to give up the ranked climb. Our assumption is that players value Promotion Marches more than regular matches, so losing a Promotion Match feels extra bad and discourages further playing.”

Patch 2.4 is just around the corner and brings some major changes! Say goodbye to Promotion Matches, and hello to bans and more. Join the dev team as they shed light on their reasoning behind these updates to Ranked.👀 https://t.co/MQz1Vli7fg pic.twitter.com/iPDieDiS7i

— League of Legends: Wild Rift (@wildrift) July 22, 2021

Riot thinks that it wasn’t just in the lower ranks that promotional matches were causing noticeable differences. Even at higher ranks, Wild Rift players kept ignoring the ranked mode once they successfully got their promotion.

This was out of fear of being de-ranked and having to go through the promo stages all over again.

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Riot will finally add bans to Wild Rift and remove promotional matches

Image via Riot Games - Wild Rift

As explained by the devs, Wild Rift will no longer include promotional games. Players will simply advance to the next rank once they achieve adequate ladder points. According to Ed “MartianSpider” Knapp, the lead game designer for Around Game on Wild Rift,

"We believe the best version of a competitive league includes bans, preferably 10 bans. However, with the current set of champions released, we worry that with 10 total bans, the result could be a majority of players’ favorite champions would be banned out, and many matches would feel “same-y.” We talked about releasing bans earlier, with either 1 or 2 bans per team, but we know this would be frustrating as a minority of players in the game would have access to bans."

Not even kidding but the toxicity is gonna reduce a bit due to removal of promotion matches. I've seen people type pretty nasty things.Thank you @wildrift

— Subodh B. (@avg_wildrift) July 22, 2021

Along with these changes, players will now be required to own 16 champions to compete within ranked games, including those in the free rotation. All updates will be arriving at Wild Rift on July 27th, along with the commencement of season 3.