Riot admits it "made mistakes" with League of Legends' ranked season, imposes hard reset at apex levels

League of Legends’ matchmaking is a puzzle that Riot will never quite be able to solve. Someone somewhere will always be angry. One little tweak can send the entire system into a spiral, and big, sweeping changes come with the risk of destabilizing it entirely. Coming into 2026, the developer actively reworked a large part of the MOBA’s matchmaking in an attempt to make the ranked climb a little smoother. It added the Aegis of Valor for those that autofill, and now attempts to pit autofilled players against one another. It added duos back into every tier of play, and attempted to make your front-facing rank more reflective of your skill. Some of those changes landed well. Others have not.

Most of the rumbling has come from the apex-level League of Legends ranks, so Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger. I’ve seen many a pro complain that this year’s climb has been volatile at best, horrendous at worst, with concerns around inconsistent matchmaking and LP gain, and issues with duo queues.

Riot admits that it “made a number of mistakes with how [it] configured the ranked system for the 2026 season start,” noting that, after surveying apex-level players’ climbs, “it was obvious that the climb this season hasn’t felt good to many of you.” As a result, when League of Legends patch 26.09 hits, the apex ranked ladder will be hit with a hard reset in an attempt to fix the playing field.

“When we surveyed groups of apex players in the affected regions, the thing we heard the most was that they wanted us to prioritize ranked ladder integrity above all else, even if that meant feeling a medium-term drop in matchmaking quality,” lead gameplay designer Matt ‘Phroxzon’ Leung-Harrison writes in an April 21 blog post.

“A hard reset means everyone starts from the same place at Master 0 LP. Nothing in the current ladder will be preserved, and it puts everyone on an equal playing field at the cost of fairer games.”

This means that everyone is starting afresh, which will, of course, ruffle some feathers. Phroxzon also notes that there will also be some “wonky matchups” as there will be “no memory of previous ranks in matchmaking. This will be a known, short-term trade-off as the state of the ladder will take several months to shake out post-reset.”

In terms of rewards, all of Season 1’s will ship as intended, with Season 3 then acting “as a final reconciliation pass for Season 2 rewards for apex-tier players in affected regions.” If you hit a higher rank in Season 3 than you did in Season 2 (you achieved Master in S2, but Grandmaster in S3), you’ll receive the Grandmaster reward for both seasons.

Looking to the future, Riot has also addressed your concerns about grindiness. As of 2027, LP gain/loss will go up to 30. “We think this strikes a better balance between requiring appropriate investment to reach the top of the ladder, while also making climbing more achievable for players who have commitments,” he writes.

The minimum LP cutoffs for both Challenger and Grandmaster will also be increasing to 800LP and 400LP, respectively, in an attempt to really separate those who have just gotten a few lucky games from those who are pushing as hard as they can.

The League of Legends apex ranked reset will hit at the start of Season 2, set to drop with patch 26.09 on Wednesday, April 29. BR, EUNE, EUW, LAN, NA, and TR will all be affected. You can also read more about the broader Season 2 changes here.

While I immediately assumed that the reset would go down like a lead balloon, Marcin ‘Jankos’ Jankowski has dropped a “great news” in the comments, with Humzh ‘Humzh’ Aborati also writing “THANK YOU RIOT.” What, on paper, sounds horrible is more of a blessing than a curse: at the end of the day, League is all about competition, so you want to be facing off against the best of the best. Hopefully, the reset will smooth things out again and, by proxy, make my lunchtime Twitch binge a lot more interesting.