What should you expect your new rank to be?

The new ranked season starts today! Everyone get excited! Oh, no. You’re a Gold 2 player? You won all your placements? But you got placed into Silver 1? Well, consider yourself lucky. You could have gotten placed into Silver 2.

Every year the League of Legends subreddit is filled with ranked sob stories. The common trend among all of them is how they were misplaced, how the system is broken and how bad Riot is at all of this stuff. The truth of the matter is far simpler: you’re intended to drop in rank. Riot has said as much year after year.

But how will you be effected? Well ...

The rest of this article is not science, so please don’t yell at me. What follows is simply speculation and hearsay based on my own experience and the experience of friends.

Here’s the rub, you’ll probably drop at least a ranked tier. If you were in Plat, you’ll end up in Gold. If you were in Gold, you’ll end up in Silver. If you were in Silver, you’ll be tossed screaming back into the bottomless pit of Bronze.

Depending on your placements, you get get more or less lucky in that regard. If you do great on your placements, maybe you’ll drop from Gold 5 to Silver 3. If you do badly though, the potential is limitless. You could end up going from Gold 5 to Bronze 2.

Now, just because you’re gonna get placed lower doesn’t mean you should be sad about placements. The new season is about a new journey! If you belong in Gold, you’ll get back to Gold. Placements seem like they can hurt you a lot more than they can help you though. So try in these games. Tryhard like you’ve never tryharded before. If you don’t get called a tryhard in game, you’re not tryharding enough.

OK, so maybe don’t go overboard but, if you want to take ranked seriously this season, be sure to start off on the right foot.

Don’t do placements

• Drunk
• High
• Sleepy
• Hungry
• Late at night (only bad, toxic people play ranked League past midnight)

You have to be in the right frame of mind, ready to go and ready to slam the enemy’s face into the dust.

Now, if you want to maintain as much of your rank as possible, you’re not gonna like what you have to do. It seems like there’s some kind of boost to placements if you’re the only one in your game going through them. Basically, it’s fairly common for someone who waits for summer/spring to do their placements to be placed similarly to how they were the season before.

Personally, I did little to no ranked work last season. I’m hoping to climb a bit more this time around. But what about you? Let us know in the comments and on Twitter how you do this year. Will you be lucky? Or will you wallow in self pity like the rest of us?