Teamfight Tactics resets the board and brings in League's tiniest superstars
Little league
Now that players have had a few weeks to feel out the Set 2 changes, Ranked matchmaking returns to a Teamfight Tactics with patch 9.23. A new season brings a clean slate, resetting everyone's ranks and bringing some significant changes to the way climbing the ranks works. More importantly: TFT added three adorable new Legends to its lineup with a banging new music video. Welcome to the battlefield, QiQi, Ossia and Melisma.
One day Riot will stop pretending to be a videogame company and go hard into music videos. TFT's tiny trio arrives courtesy of a short new video from League of Legends's kinda-in-universe hip-hop supergroup True Damage. It slaps.
The crux of this week's update is the return of ranked matchmaking. With substantial changes made to the TFT format with Set 2, everyone has been brought back down to Iron, wiping the slate clean for a new season.
That's not all, though. Riot explained some of the bigger balance changes arriving with today's update in the patch 9.23 notes posted earlier today.
"The big news this patch is the return of the ranked queue. On the balance front, we made a host of small changes and fixed a bunch of game-altering bugs. The method to our madness focuses on shifting some power into Tier 2 and Tier 3 three-star Champions while pulling some power from the stronger Tier 1 Champions. We’re glad we took the extra patch to get all of the new-set jitters out, but overall we’re really excited about the state of Rise of the Elements."
While everyone's rank has been hard reset, a corresponding MMR do-over hasn't been quite so severe. Riot's Richard Henckel explained that it was important to leave enough of a gap between top players and fresh newbies to keep things somewhat fair in a forum post earlier this week.
"We don't want someone totally new to ranked ending up in a game with all of you former challenger players, just like we don't want a challenger player finding themselves in a lobby with a bunch of players in Iron (and me). Since we’d changed SO much about the game however, we went with a soft reset to reflect the learning process we are all going through while maintaining the competitive nature of the queue."
They've also tweaked how gaining and losing ranks works in TFT. Your first five placement matches will never see you drop in rank, while you can no longer lose LP by finishing games in fourth place. Riot called the latter a "clear pain point" last season, with players complaining that it felt pretty rough losing points for just scraping below that top-three finish.
A full changelist of this week's balance changes, bug fixes and more can be found over on the patch 9.23 notes.