Season 17 of Apex Legends will be bringing some new changes to its rank matchmaking, marking a significant foundational shift.

The devs will be overhauling the scoring system and how players climb the rank ladder; changing the matchmaking out of the hood to provide more consistent competitive matches over matches. Thus marking the first such of many changes that’s coming this year for ranks.

Matchmaking

A strong focus on matchmaking and creating competitive matches is the number one goal said the dev team. A brand new matchmaking system done with a hidden skill rating called MMR will be implemented in Season 17. Premade squads are taken into account to balance the competitive scene, along with the advantages premade is to have versus solos.

A new scoring system will be set which aims to put emphasis on winning the battle royale versus just racking up kills every match. The dev team retired the term rank points and are now calling them Ladder Points (LP).

The entry cost is now static no matter what player’s rank level is, and the scoring for placement reins consistent at each rank level. Bonuses are applied to a player’s score based on a number of factors covering kills, assists, MMR performance and relation to the player’s ladder level and how challenging of a match that the player is in.

There won’t be any more splits in the season of Apex Legend either, as the rank climb resets on the seasonal reset. The main reason for this change is that provisional matches will be added to help better gauge player’s placement at the start of their rank journey for the season.

Competitive Integrity 

The rank level requirement has been increased from 20 to 50, which helps slow down some smurfs and help give the dev team a little bit more time to detect cheaters that are trying to quickly get into high level rank matches.

Next, the dev team will be decoupling the matchmaking from separating MMR and ladder points. This means that the matchmaker will be able to build games based on skill, not purely on ladder placement. So if players were to cheat their way up to a lot of ladder points, they’ll still only play against people of their own skill regardless.

Adding the provisional match system will help reduce the negative effects of cheaters by keeping them from stomping their way up the ladder. But it’ll also slow them down a little bit and make them a little easier to catch.

As with botting accounts, factors such as the increased level requirement and rolling out new detection methods and bandwidth being, players should see improvements there.

A new scoring change called collusion will allow players to receive LP for unique kills and assists, which means players can no longer farm points with respawn beacons. There will also be new detection methods that will be rolled out.