Rule Change: Counting Rank

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, it is becoming more and more difficult to track down Summoners’ Season 3 ranks. (This started a while ago; I heard a rumor that Riot decided to start blocking the part of the API that produced S3 rank data.) Whatever the cause, I think it’s about time that we update our rank-counting rules. After discussion with staff, we’ve decided to adopt the following rule across the board:

For Factions purposes, a Summoner’s rank is defined as their current solo queue Summoner’s Rift rank.

A couple points of clarification:

• During periods in between seasons, use the most recent season’s rank.
• Summoners who sign up for a tournament or Featured Matches in advance are treated as having the rank they held at the time of sign-up. (Since Season 4 has ended, this won’t come up in the near future, but I wanted to note it anyway.)

I admit I’d rather continue to use the “higher of S3 and S4” rule, but it’s simply no longer workable for technical reasons. I’m not going to demand that our scoring volunteers (who work very hard, by the way) should spend time doing detective work to figure out each Summoner’s rank.

There are some significant advantages to this rule:

• Clarity. Some people have been confused by the “higher of current season rank or end-of-season rank from Season 3” rule. It’s kind of a mouthful. The new rule is very clear: current rank. This has occasionally led to a lot of stress during Featured Matches.
• Efficiency. It’s much easier to check someone’s current (S4) rank than to look up their S3 rank as well, due to the aforementioned technical limitations.
• LoLNexus. LoL Nexus screenshots are handy, but they have to be grabbed during the match. This led to a nontrivial number of matches being submitted without this information, forcing scorers to go hunt down each Summoner’s rank “manually”—quite a laborious process, especially when you’re scoring 20 matches at a time. Now, if someone forgets the LoLNexus, a LoLKing or similar screenshot should do just fine.

Of course, there are some drawbacks. There are always going to be people who played a lot of Ranked in the previous season but haven’t done much in the current season, and thus have a current rank that doesn’t really reflect their ability level. Unfortunately, I’m not seeing a workable solution to this problem. If you have an idea, feel free to put it forward.

It goes without saying that I would be very unhappy if anyone were to try to game the system by deliberately avoiding Ranked, or by tanking their placement matches on purpose. It might become necessary to have an “override” list for certain Summoners, but I’m wary of this idea: it’s inherently arbitrary and ad hoc, and poses serious fairness problems of its own. For now, I’m just going to ask people to be honest. No system of rules can completely obviate the need for honesty, and Factions has a relative scarcity of resources available to impose and enforce complex rule systems. Fortunately, I believe Factions is a good community with an above-average allotment of honesty.

—CupcakeTrap

About CupcakeTrap

Caitlyn, you monster.