Upcoming Changes to League Play in Season 3

With our announcement of Season 3 coming Soon™, we wanted to share a few changes that we’re going to be making to League Play starting with Season 3.

First things first, we’re going to try a new Playlist for League Play. We first debuted Team Elimination for the first time during Brawl Crawl this season, and later brought it back as its own featured Playlist. We also held a tournament focused around this mode, as we feel that it highlights a lot more of the strategy in the game (and discourages running out the clock when a team’s ahead like we’ve seen in some competitive matches of Team KO). Also, there’s really nothing like being the last one standing on your team on the match-point, and taking on the entire enemy team in an epic 1v3. That’s a clippable moment right there.

This won’t be the exact same Team Elimination from earlier this season, though. We’ve made some small tweaks and bug fixes to the mode which will be live with Season 3:

• Any balls not held by a brawler will respawn on ball spawners after a team wipe, to prevent one team from having as much ball control.
• If you join a match in progress, you’ll spectate until the first team wipe, because nobody wants to spawn in the middle of the danger zone with no chance to avoid getting KO’d.
• It’s no fun to respawn right next to the opposing team, so we fixed a bug that caused that to happen more often than it should have (which is never).
• Coming in a patch after Season 3 launches will be a fix for the spectating bug that can make your camera angle look further up or down than the player you’re spectating is on their game.

With this update, we’re also going to be removing Face-Off from League Play in Season 3. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but we want to ensure that players in all of our available playlists are having a good experience, and due to a couple of factors, we don’t feel like we’re able to provide that with Face-Off right now. We’d love to revisit this in the future, but until further notice, League Play is going to be focused on the Team Elimination Playlist.

That said, we’ve also heard a lot of feedback about how today’s Skill Rating is calculated, and we’ve decided to do a complete overhaul of the system. For Season 1 and Season 2, your Skill Rating (SR) was tied to your MMR. MMR has a max of 5000, and there was another variable (volatility) that would be subtracted from that to determine your SR. Volatility had a minimum value of 200, meaning the top SR was 4400. There were a few issues with this system:

• MMR is a great value to matchmake off of. It’s not a great value to grind to climb a leaderboard. We know it’s frustrating to win a match and see zero increase to your SR for five games in a row, and then a single loss makes you lose 40 points.
• It’s a less transparent system. MMR is harder to calculate, so it’s impossible to know why you’re gaining or losing the exact number of points that you are.
• Finally, 4400 isn’t a very fun number to represent the top rank!

For Season 3, we’re scrapping the current Skill Rating system and starting over from scratch. A few things will stay the same: Only Diamond players in League Play will see their SR. This number won’t be used for matchmaking (we’ll still use your MMR for that). Here’s how it will work:

• You’ll always gain SR on a win. By default, you gain 20 points when you win a match.
• You’ll always lose SR on a loss. By default, you lose 20 points on a loss.
• Gains and losses are reduced for players with over 4000 SR.

• 4000 - 4500: Half points on wins/losses (10 points base)
• 4500 - 4900: Quarter points on wins/losses (5 points base)
• 4900 - 5000: Eighth points on wins/losses (2.5 points base)

If your MMR is higher than your SR, that suggests you’re playing harder matches than your SR implies.

• You’ll gain 50% more points if your MMR is more than 200 higher than your SR on a win
• You’ll only lose half as many SR points as you would have if your MMR is any higher than your SR on a loss

On the flip side, if your MMR is lower than your SR, there are similar impacts to SR:

• You’ll lose 50% more points if your MMR is more than 200 lower than your SR
• You’ll gain half as many SR if you win a game where your MMR is any lower than your SR.
• Planned for patch 3.1, SR will decay by 100 for every week of inactivity. Your MMR will not change.

Obviously a lot of changes! But we feel great about this making your movements up and down (hopefully more up than down!) the leaderboards more straightforward. 

Also, in an effort to keep the various rankings across League Play more consistent, we’re reducing the number of League Points needed to go from Unranked to Bronze, and also from Silver to Gold. All other tiers beside Unranked and Silver are unchanged.

Season 3 is going to be incredible, and we have a lot more to announce (very!) soon on the theme, the new map, and the other cool stuff coming to Knockout City on October 5th, so stay tuned. Until then, whether you’re aiming to hit Platinum or fighting to make top 10 in Diamond, good luck on your road to finishing out Season 2 strong!