League of Legends Ranked 2026: What’s Changing

In short, autofill helps to ease queues. Without it, queuing would be out of control, and players would be kept waiting for extended periods. Riot Games has noticed that a frustrating element of autofill has been players getting a role they didn’t pick. In the new autofill update, Riot Games will try to match all autofilled players with other autofilled players in the same position.

If that isn’t possible, the autofill will aim to have the same number of autofilled players on each team. Again, if that fails, if a team has more autofilled players than the other team, they will get higher MMR players. The idea here is that this will help to prevent mismatches.

Aegis of Valor will get activated during an autofilled game if a player has a minimum mastery score of C. Aegis of Valor will then give you either double LP or full protection from LP loss. If this system is activated during the game, you will be notified.

Another frustrating area for players this year has been how long it takes to get back into lobbies. When this happens, opponents may be able to predict your picks, so Riot Games is looking to reduce dodging. To achieve this, dodging will not reset your autofill status. If a player chooses to dodge, their autofill will remain for their next match.

Another improvement will be that dodging will count as a loss to those at Master or higher. So, not only will the autofill status carry over, but players will also get a cooldown timer and a full loss. These changes should, hopefully, encourage players to play out games and discourage repeated dodging.

Players have reported in 2025 that the waiting time to get into a game has been awful at times. To help ease this, Riot Games will no longer allow players to ban an ally’s hovered champion, because they feel that players having the chance to play their chosen champion is far more important than other players having the ability to ban people from games. To also help the waiting time, Riot Games is reducing the amount of animations by 30 seconds, to help it flow a lot better.

Another area of improvement has been noted as how ranked skills are distributed. Riot Games has realized that players have a lot more in-game knowledge than in recent years, so a Bronze player these days knows more than Bronze players did when Ranked was introduced. To improve the experience for everyone, the tiers will be recalibrated so that the actual skill of players reflects the ranks. Alongside this, you can expect to see a Climb Indicator, which will appear when your rank is running behind your MMR.

Speaking of MMR, some changes are coming to Flex and Solo MMR. To help reduce mismatching among Flex and Solo/Duo, the ranks will be more aligned. So, while you can continue playing with your friends, the gameplay experience will be a lot fairer.