Team Liquid’s CoreJJ ends up in Iron I following placement matches

Team Liquid’s CoreJJ ends up in Iron I following placement matches in the North American solo queue. 

Climbing up the ranks in League of Legends’ ranked matches is a struggle we can all relate to. With a new season full of changes coming up, that means the shadow of the best of 10 placement matches loom larger and larger. We’ve all been there, the fear of landing in the lower tiers, previously the infamous Bronze division and now the new-for-2019 Iron division. Well, guess what – this is also true for Pro players, apparently. Team Liquid’s new support, 2017 world champion Jo “CoreJJ” Yong-In ended up in Iron I in the North American solo queue after finishing his placement matches.

Not even a perfect winning record through the ten games saved CoreJJ from this hilariously bad situation. And things get even worse considering that the former World Championship winner managed that feat while queuing with Diamond players, which in theory should have boosted his MMR enough to escape the Iron division. It’s worth noticing, however, that CoreJJ went through his first placement matches on a new account, which means that achieving Diamond or Platinum would not have been possible one way or another.

It obviously didn’t lessen CoreJJ’s shock at the result. Team Liquid’s new support player shared his surprise on stream. You can check out his funny reaction in the video below.

As you can see, this is an entirely new experience for the pro player, who doesn’t recall having such a low ranking in solo queue – not even during his early League of Legends days. But CoreJJ could probably count himself lucky. New Echo Fox jungler Yoonjae “Rush” Lee, who came back to North America following a stint with KT Rolster in the LCK, found himself in Iron IV.

Riot Games introduces a new ranked system for 2019

League of Legends is going through another preseason full of changes. While last year’s preseason saw the introductions of the new runes and masteries system, runes reforged, 2018 revamped the rankings for solo and flex queue. Riot Games scrapped the old rankings, which had five tiers split into five divisions, plus the Master and Challenge ranks, and replaced it with a new one. The “metal” tiers now feature four divisions instead of five, which also led to the introduction of CoreJJ and Rush’s Iron tier, below Bronze. The changes also saw the creation of the Grandmaster rank, placed between Challenger and Master.

The changes don’t stop here. Riot plans to deploy positional ranks at some point. In other words, players will get rated according to their performance on specific roles. As it is right now, if a Platinum toplaner who specializes on tanks gets auto-filled to AD Carry, they might get matched against a Platinum AD Carry main player. Off-role matchups would usually turn into a one-sided beatdown.

That won’t be the case anymore. That same toplaner will now have a different rank for both roles. More importantly, they also have the choice to queue for a single role instead of the usual two. Although that might make the wait longer, it does allow players to master their favorite role without being forced to play something they don’t necessarily like. If the player is an all-rounder, it won’t be an issue either, as they will get the chance to play on every role whenever the urge arises. All in all, this is a great change.

League of Legends Season 9

The popular Riot Games title enters its ninth season in 2019. With the preseason already underway since late November, players have plenty of time to get used to the changes before the new season officially kicks off. Riot made another round of modifications, adding barricades to the turrets with the intention of extending the laning phase. Another change was introduced to the bounty system, which now not only takes kills into account, but also the player’s creep score. The minions themselves also suffered some slight modifications which will, at the same time, make comebacks and snowballing leads a lot easier.

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The runes reforged system, introduced last preseason, gets the addition of stat shards, similar to the old runes. These shards, not your primary and secondary trees, will determine your additional stats for the game. This change makes the whole system much more flexible, allowing for a wider range of combinations.

Following along the tracks of last year’s dramatic changes to warding and in-game vision, wards no longer scale according to a player’s average level. Trinkets will now stay around according to the average level of all the ten players in the game. This means that the leading team will no longer hold a massive advantage.

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Popular summoner spell Teleport, which recently saw an increase in its usage, saw another important change. It’s now impossible to cancel the spell. In other words, you are either fully committed to teleporting in or not using it at all.

Season 9 officially begins on January 23, 2019.

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