League of Legends' Season 8 World Championship is drawing closer and the season itself to a close. Riot Games have announced ranked changes for Season 9 months ago, but the first preview has come on 19 September 2018, with new tiers.
Riot Games have posted a short YouTube video where League of Legends game designers are offering a glimpse in the new ranking system for Season 9, which includes two new tiers - Grand Master and Iron.
Those names might sound a bit confusing and your intuition might be wrong if it told you that one is on top of the ladder while the other is second from the bottom. In fact, it's the opposite - Grand Master is second from the top, between Challenger and Master, while Iron will be placed below Bronze.
While the community would have loved for the new tier to be called Wood or Plastic in order to unleash the full power of memes all over the League of Legends subreddit, this will likely not be the case unless a large scale petition for a name change happens.
That said, the reasons for the design team to add these new tiers was mostly so players can see the progress better than they did before. The Iron tier will offer lower ranked players a sense of achievement as they will be able to climb faster in theory, while the Grand Master tier is there to fix Diamond tier's issues.
Many high ranked players have been complaining that there is a massive skill discrepancy between players in Diamond 5 and Diamond 1, so the introduction of Grand Master tier should iron out the issues and separate good players from the truly great with more accuracy.
Riot Games
Due to addition of these two new tiers, all tiers will now have four divisions instead of five. Naturally, these changes will not happen until the next pre-season kicks off, which should happen at some point after Season 9 World Championship. Speaking of which, Chinese teams look poised to take the throne away from Korea this year.
League of Legends - showcase of several champion splash arts
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