LoL: Viral Conspiracy Theory - Did Riot Implement Emerald Just For The Sake Of Keeping Gamers Playing?

Those of you that play LoL ranked have probably felt the pain of being stuck at a certain rank.

Since patch 13.13 introduced Emerald Rank into the ranking system, many players have questioned whether this implementation was a good idea or not. Was there a good reason for adding a new rank? Players have conjured up a viral conspiracy theory that Riot is just doing this to keep gamers playing.

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Is Emerald Rank Doing More Harm Than Good?

When Emerald Rank was introduced, Rioters revealed they felt that the ranking system back then did not accurately depict the skills of LoL players. Basically, most players were scaled at a rank lower than they should have been in.

In order to counteract this problem, Riot brought over a new rank, that also exists in Wild Rift: Emerald.

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With the implementation of Emerald Rank, Riot hopes to flatten the rank curve, so your rank will actually accurately represent your skill level in LoL.

To make this goal more understandable, they added a fancy graph to their statement:

Now, this sounds nice enough, but many players don't seem to believe that this was Riot's only intention when they added this feature.

In a discussion thread on Reddit, one user made a bold claim that Riot didn't add this new rank to even out the rank distribution, but instead in order to keep gamers stuck to playing the game.

The amount of people feeling happy because they "FINALLY" hit gold/plat after being "STUCK FOR YEARS" is scary to me. [...] Because of that Riot decided to give a big dopamine boost to people who were stacked for ages and made them feel better about themselves. Just to let them stuck again [...]

While some users agree with this idea, there are others that feel discouraged to continue playing after the rank system update:

Made me feel the opposite, I just got to plat for the first time before they released emerald. Now I'm plat 4 and thinking I have to grind to emerald to validate myself

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Another Reddit user added:

I am right there with you. I have been trying to get Diamond forever [...] Now it is like great Emerald is a new harder version of platinum and Diamond is even further, almost feels hopeless.

Some people believe that this new rank didn't actually change much for players trying to play ranked:

me, a gold player since season 4, got gold 4 this split again, stopped playing ranked. they could add 10 more ranks and I'll still just get to the ranked reward because solo q sucks.

Either way, it seems playing LoL ranked remains painful, yet still addicting enough to keep people playing. So maybe there was some truth in that theory.

But remember, League is just a game. No need to stress yourself out about what rank you are, as long as you enjoy playing!