Rocket League Competitive Rank Recalibration

We just deployed a hotfix that adjusts how Rocket League ’s Competitive Skill Tiers are assigned to players and wanted to give you all some more information on what's changing.

Skill Distribution

Our Skill Tiers - Prospect, Challenger, Star, and Champion - are calibrated to reflect the overall distribution of player skills for the entire population of Rocket League. Like in many other games, this ends up looking a lot like a bell curve / normal distribution over time. In short, that means a lot of players are “average” and the further you get from average skill, the fewer players exist to fit that criteria. This essentially means you see a whole lot of Challenger I players, and not so many Grand Champions overall.

Since the skill reset at the start of Season 3, all four competitive playlists have settled into normal distributions over time, but on a slightly different scale than in Seasons 1 and 2. This isn't a bad thing in general, but it does mean that our old thresholds for deciding who gets promoted to Rising Star, Super Champion, etc. could be balanced a little better for the current season.

Adjusting Tiers

We just deployed two changes to address this and better distribute the active competitive player-base across the Skill Tiers:

Skill Tier thresholds have been lowered to include more players in the Star and Champion tiers.
Skill Tier Thresholds are now configured differently based on which mode you’re playing. The skill curve for 1v1 looks a little different than 3v3, for instance. This means Doubles now has different criteria for reaching Grand Champion than Solo Standard does. Each playlist should see similar percentages of players reach Champion tier and above. Because there are more total players playing Doubles, you’ll see more Doubles Grand Champions overall.

In terms of how this will affect your personal rankings: most players at Challenger and above will see themselves gain anywhere from ½ to 2 skill tiers. For instance, a Rising Star in Doubles might now be considered a Shooting Star or a low-division All-Star. Prospect-ranked players will move less so -- from no change to roughly half a rank.

Your ranks are not automatically updated, but winning matches will quickly calibrate you to the correct new rankings. Listed below, are some visuals of the overall Skill Distribution for Competitive Doubles for Season 3, before and after the changes.

Before

After

As always, we'll continue to keep an eye on Competitive rankings and their related systems. See you again next time!

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Written by Michelle-Louise Janion

I tend to favour the puzzle, RPG, action-adventure and strategy genres. My particular favourites over the years have been Final Fantasy IX, Metal Gear Solid, Civilisation V and The Last of Us. I'm also a sucker for a series: Darksiders, Assassin's Creed, Tomb Raider etc.

I am a bit of a lone gamer as I tend to steer clear of PvP, and only play multiplayer with close friends.