If you’ve been keeping up with the League of Legends patch notes for the public beta environment, you might already know that there is going to be a new leagues system for competitive ranked play on League of Legends. It’s currently being tested out, and will eventually go onto the live servers in some form of what the testing version is like now.

The basic premise of the league system is that you’re placed into a league, and you compete to earn points in order to get promoted and demoted from divisions inside the leagues. If you do extremely well, you can also get promoted to the next league.

The main idea of doing this was to get rid of the elo system – basically, Riot Games didn’t want each individual person to have a numerical value assigned to them that signifies their skill level. They also wanted to make the scale of competition more local – instead of being on a massive ladder of hundreds of thousands of people, you are now competing against a handful of other people who have been placed into your division.

My initial opinion about this is that, although it might be pretty on the outside, it seems to be the same as before on the inside. It doesn’t seem like matchmaking will prioritize you with people in your own divi­sion (and if it did, it would get pretty frustrating because you would be playing with and against the same people over and over). The number of points you earn to move on to the next league seem to still be global.

Going back to matchmaking, it most likely will completely ignore what league or division you’re in, because it will still use a hidden elo (or MMR, which stands for match making rating), just like normal games do. So, if you seem to be a very unlucky silver league player who always fails your promotion series, you might have a high-enough hidden elo that you’re queued with gold and platinum league players, but still never manage to get out of silver league.

Of course, I had to try this out, and as we all know, the people on PBE are complete trolls (or are just plain stupid or bad). I streamed my experience to share with everyone.

Out of the first three games I played, two of those games I had to carry so hard that if something like this happened on the normal server, you would be considered some sort of god. The first game I played Kassadin and went 33/10/13 (the tenth death being an execution to a super minion), and the third game I played Miss Fortune and went 29/9/11.

I ended up placing into Silver Division I (which was named Zyra’s Infiltrators for me).

If you’re also interested in trying out the new leagues system, you can head on over to the public beta server (and prepare to carry as hard as I did if you want to win). If you want to watch the replays of my stream, they can be found on Twitch.TV at http://twitch.tv/parkzer/b/359268549 for the first part and http://twitch.tv/parkzer/b/359328617 for the second.