Welcome to Competitive in 2023! We have a lot of change in store for you all, so buckle in for some high-level information on what’s coming up. 

When looking at our competitive systems and what it really meant to refocus on PVP, we asked the community what you wanted from these new systems. From Reddit to Twitter, Discord calls to DMs, your feedback directed us towards the following four goals for PVP in 2023: 

  • More competitive play opportunities
  • Fun and meaningful PVP for all skill levels
  • Experiencing variety through new formats
  • Prestigious Rewards 

With all of this in mind, we’ve made some sweeping changes and are kicking off a fresh, new Beta Season. Since this is a beta, not all of the changes will be implemented yet, so this will also act as a sneak peek of things to come! Your feedback will be absolutely integral in helping us shape what Competitive will look like when we move out of our Beta Season, so please head over to Reddit and leave your thoughts and impressions in the thread there! Check out what’s the same, what’s changing, and what’s new below! 

Gauntlets/Tournaments

Gauntlets have traditionally been a way to earn Prime Glory and practice in the same format as Seasonal Tournaments. We experimented with the Timewinder Gauntlets to see how players reacted to them and gained some valuable insight. Taking those learnings, we created Daily Rumbles and Runeterra Opens. 

Daily Rumble

The Gauntlet Structure has changed with the introduction of Daily Rumbles. For the Beta Season, you’ll play until you get 6 total wins or 3 total losses. The Daily Rumble will be a nightly tournament opening in the evening (4 PM – 2 AM shard time ) You can only enter the Daily Rumble once per day, so be ready!

Each week the format of Daily Rumbles will rotate, providing all styles of players an opportunity to scratch that competitive itch.  Here is a sneak-peek at the first rotation of Daily Rumbles, planned to drop in February.

Format Breakdowns

  • Champions Unlimited Bo1
    • Deckbuilding Rules:
      • unlimited number of Champions.
      • Max 3 copies of each card
      • 2 Regions
    • No Pick/Ban
    • Best of 1
  • Standard Bo3
    • Deckbuilding Rules:
      • Standard Deckbuilding Rules
    • Pick/Ban
    • Best of 3
  • Free Build Bo1
    • Deck Building Rules:
      • Unlimited Champions,
      •  Up to 10 Regions
      •  30-75 cards
  • Standard Bo1
    • Deckbuilding Rules:
      • Standard Deckbuilding Rules
      • No Pick/Ban
      • Best of 3

Editor’s Note: After rotation is live, you can expect to see some Eternal formats on the Gauntlet Schedule! 

Daily Rumble Buy-in

We want Daily Rumbles to foster a competitive feel and have higher stakes. To raise the stakes, we will have a buy-in of 650 Green Shards or 200 Coins. This price is heavily discounted during our Beta Season as we want to give you a chance to participate more and really try out the mode! We’re still figuring out what number feels right to keep the stakes high enough for everyone to bring their A-game, but also low enough to be accessible for players. 

Daily Rumble Rewards

Beta Season Daily Rumble Rewards, those with eagle-eyes may have noticed Titles and Trophies in the rewards. You must be wondering what the heck these all are! We will explain them soon!

Runeterra Open 

In Runeterra Opens you will play until you acquire 8 wins or 3 losses.

Each month, 2 weeks after the update, we will hold a Monthly Runeterra Open. The Runeterra Open is available on Saturday and Sunday, and you’ll get to play once during the weekend.

This is a large Tournament with no entry fee that EVERYBODY can participate in. These will have greater rewards and offer more rapid progress through your Season Rewards Track than Daily Rumbles. They all also provide an opportunity for our most competitive players to train and compete for high stakes more frequently. 

It was important to us that anybody can participate with no entry fees for the Runeterra Opens. We really hope that this can be a super exciting moment for the community where everybody can come together and try their hand at competition regardless of how sweaty they are.

After Beta Season, a second layer of competition will be added to the Runeterra Opens. Day One (Saturday)  will remain unchanged from what you see in the Beta Season, but Day Two (Sunday) will have players with qualifying scores face off in a head-to-head tournament, with one winner decided. We’ll be adjusting the rewards after the Beta Season to reflect this added layer of competition.

Runeterra Open Rewards

Beta Season Runeterra Open Rewards. 

World Qualifier Opens 

Once we finally move out of Beta Season every second Runeterra Open in a season is going to be buffed up to a World Qualifier Open. Placing first in the World Qualifier Open will auto-qualify you for Worlds (as opposed to Regional Qualifiers in the past).

We still aren’t ready to share exact reward structures yet, but once we finish Beta Season we will be sure to update you with more details! 

Worlds 2023

Many players wanted to see AlanZQ at the 2022 Worlds Finals, we’re listening and want to officially announce that the 2022 World Finalists AragOrnn will directly qualify to 2023 Worlds.

Editor’s Note: Alan’s commentary was legendary, so I’m personally glad we got to unleash his talents as a caster!

Our old system of Seasonal Points and Ladder Points is going away, and now we will just have Runeterra Points.

Runeterra Points are earned primarily from Runeterra Opens and World Qualifier Opens. Additionally, a very small amount can be earned from participating in the Ladder. During our Beta Season we will not be rewarding Runeterra Points (we’re going to be tweaking the exact numbers to make sure we get it right), but we want to give you a high-level view of what to expect so you can provide us with feedback appropriately!

You let us know that playing all year only to have your journey end at the Regional Qualifiers without facing off against the top talent around the globe felt really bad. So, to make Worlds feel even more competitive and rewarding, we constructed a new flow.

This year, Qualifying for Worlds is going to throw you directly onto the international stage. Instead of each shard qualifying 64 players, there will be a pool of global players qualified straight to worlds. 

There will be 4 main ways to qualify for worlds:

  1. Earn top-cut Runeterra Points, cumulative from the entire year
  2. Earn top-cut Runeterra Points from a specific Season
  3. Win a Select Runeterra Open
  4. Win a Last Chance Qualifier tournament (held leading up to Worlds)
Visual mock-up of different ways to Qualify for Worlds 2023. LCQ Stands for “Last Chance Qualifier” This is how the system will aspirationally look after we finish our Beta Season. We’re still making adjustments and will post finalized Worlds plans at a later date

Ladder

Ladder will no longer be an avenue to gain entry to Seasonal Tournaments. Therefore, Ladder will also award fewer Runeterra Points than other competitive paths. We’re not leaving ladder fans wrung out to dry, however. We’re exploring with more ways to reward players who love the climb including:

  • Player Titles for top Ladder Finishers each season
    • Top 8 during the Beta Season will receive the “Righteous” title
    • Top 100 during the Beta Season will receive the “Divine Flame” title
  • Exclusive Icons based off of their Ranked Ladder finish will continue as well

We hope that this will allow Ladder to fulfill its role as a competitive practice ground to test your creativity and hone your skills against the meta. 

PVP Rewards

Season Badges

Designs for World Ender/ Beta Season Season Badges

Season Badges are a new way to customize your profile and show off your accomplishments. They will be displayed on the loading screen as you prepare to face off against another player in a match. In the future, your highest season badge from each season will be displayed on your loadout! Don’t miss out on this super awesome beta season badge. 

Titles

This is one of the Titles obtained from the Season Reward Track during the Beta Season

Titles are a new way to show off your mastery and prestige to your friends. They are a way to express and show off who you are as a player. We also see this as an opportunity to reward the most exceptional players with premiere titles that prove their mettle. Some Titles also have the ability to “level up.” For example, if you finish a Daily Rumble with 6 wins you unlock the “Contender” Title. If you manage to do that 10 times, it will level up to the “Rival” Title.

Editor’s Note: Even when a Title levels up, you can still equip the old one if you like it better! 

Trophies

Trophies represent your victories and your progress on the Season Reward Track

The third and most mysterious item on the list. We’ve traditionally had our Event Passes filled with a bunch of goodies to earn in-game, and that isn’t going to change. We’re simply adding an additional reward path dedicated to, and progressed by, playing Daily Rumbles and Runeterra Opens. The Trophies are going to represent your progress on the Season Reward Track! 

Season Reward Track

Picture of Beta Season Reward Track. Images, rewards, and naming are works in progress

Season Badges are a unique reward to the Season Reward Track! You may have noticed that Prime Glory is missing from the Gauntlet reward list, but worry not; you can still earn Prime Glory by progressing your Season Reward Track far enough. 

The more you win, the faster you will progress through this Season Reward Track. We’re still tinkering with the exact length of this and the position of the rewards, so please give us feedback and expect adjustments to be made as we polish this new feature. 

Shooting for Targon’s Peak

The Legends of Runeterra team is full of dedicated developers that are scrappy and wear many hats to get awesome features out to YOU, the players. We’re really doubling-down on communication with our community in 2023, and part of that is being more transparent and sharing things early on in the development process so we can get your input.

We want to make sure we’re prioritizing efforts around what matters to our players, so here are some of the aspects we’re beginning to scope out. We can really use your feedback on which of these features you want to see from us so we can invest our resources in the right places. 

Grassroots Tournament Support

We would love a world in which we can partner with some of our very dedicated community Tournament Organizers to offer a small amount of Runeterra Points to further incentivize hardcore players to play in these Community Tournaments. Expanding the circuit and opportunities for players to meet and compete we feel would be a massive win.

This requires a deep dive into what sort of support we can legally provide, as well as needing some feature requests, but with enough interest we feel like it is definitely on the table. 

Tournament Creation Tools

This is one that has been on our radar as something super-cool but it is also super-complicated. This would definitely require a lot of  resources from our team and engineers, but if we have enough of a desire for it, we will begin exploring whether or not it’s possible for us to develop this without delaying other planned content releases. 

Cross-Shard Competition

Our community is pretty tight-knit and we have a lot of people who organize and participate in tournaments that have friends who are separated by shards. We’re currently investigating how we can make it possible for our players to play cross-shard without having to jump through quite as many hoops

FAQ

How much time will it take to complete the Season Reward Track?

We want PVP rewards to feel prestigious, and as such want the most difficult reward track items, such as the Diamond Season Badge and “Gladiator” Titles to be on the more difficult side to obtain. It’s important that these signify some of our best and most dedicated players each season.

Daily Rumbles are meant to test effort as well as allow players to experience variety with a daily competitive feel. That means playing in dailies over the course of the entire season should allow you to claim some rewards.

Runeterra Opens are a community celebration, but also a test of skill. Everyone who participates will receive large rewards, but finishing high will accelerate your reward track incredibly fast.  

How can we advocate for our favorite format to come to the Weekly Gauntlet?

Excellent question! We’re partnering with the Reddit Community to gather feedback. Please head over to the LoR subreddit and look for the Stickied thread “Format Feedback!” Even if English isn’t your first language, don’t hesitate to come interact with the broader community and share your ideas! 

What about the World Ender Seasonal Tournament that is on the old system?

Winners from the World Ender Seasonal Tournament will directly qualify to the 2023 Worlds Group Stage. 

Can I earn Runeterra Points during the Beta Season?

No, Runeterra Points won’t be available during the Beta Season. We want to make sure the numbers are balanced before we add them to the system. They’ll become available once we move out of the Beta Season.

How long is a Ranked Season?

Once out of beta, a Tournament Season will be three months. However, each Tournament Season will have two Ranked Seasons. 

How long is the Beta Season?

We’re currently hoping to gather all of the data and finish fine-tuning within a few months. We’ll be letting players know more before we move out of Beta Season.

Will the Season Reward Track update every Ranked Season? 

Yes. This means there will be two Season Reward Tracks across a Tournament Season. 

Whoa, Tournament Season? What the heck does that mean?

A tournament season will coincide with our Expansions. Each Tournament Season will have two Runeterra Opens and one World Qualifier Open. A Tournament season will last roughly three months.  

How can we leave our feedback?

We’ve been partnering closely with our friends over at the Legends of Runeterra subreddit and will have a pinned feedback thread. We’re also always checking our twitter which you can tag @PlayRuneterra to get our eyes on your feedback!

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