• Night Demon

With the most recent Ranked season coming to a close, I wanted to address one of the hot topics around matchmaking, specifically about artificially depressing your KDA. First and foremost, I want to make clear that encouraging players to try and win is a fundamental goal of ours, and all of our supporting systems should encourage you to win. However, we are seeing edge cases where players attempt to game the system and find more favorable matches by manipulating their KDA. There are two edge cases that we have seen manifest where: 1) Players who trade their life to accrue advantages in other areas of the game such as tower damage or pressure in other lanes (looking at you, Sion). 2) Players who actively try to ruin their KDAs in a winning situation so that they would get a more favorable match in the subsequent games. We don't want to dictate how you try to win, as we believe that it's healthy to have a variety of paths to victory. But we want to step in to help address Ranked system manipulation. The Wild Rift MMR system uses an updated algorithm that incorporates a multitude of game behaviors such as winning/losing, KDA, lane assignments, team fight participation, damage taken %, healing %, and many others. Our goal is to reward all the positive in-game behaviors, and KDA is only one of these factors. An adjustment we are rolling out with the next patch will look to increase the weight of winning or losing the game relative to the other factors. Now, your game's outcome will be a more significant determinant for future matchmaking accuracy. At the end of the day, consistently supporting your team toward victory is the best way to climb, and trying to artificially depress your KDA will be detrimental. There are more improvements we are looking into to improve your overall ranked journey. We plan on being more timely in our response to your feedback and updates around matchmaking in the future. Lastly, I want to thank the players who are thoughtfully voicing their opinions and beliefs back to us. This is tremendously important for us to evaluate our performance, and the ball is in our court now to repay you with tangible changes that improve your day-to-day experience.