What the number means

What the number is

Your in-house rating is one integer, and it means one thing: how likely this site thinks you are to win a game here. It is not your Riot rank, and it does not come from your Riot rank after your first few games. Nor is it a score for how well you played — winning is what moves it, and the most a brilliant game can add on top of that is 5 points.

Everyone starts at 1000, in the middle of grade D+ — with room to fall and room to climb, rather than sitting on a boundary where two losses cost you a letter. C is the first grade you climb *to*. The grades are letters rather than Iron-through-Challenger on purpose: a profile that claimed "Emerald II" twice, once for Riot and once for us, gave you no way to tell which of the two had been earned here.

• One number, always visible, on your profile and on every lobby you're in.
• It moves only on rated in-house games. Scrims, tournaments and test lobbies move nothing.
• It can't go below zero, and there is no ceiling.

How a game moves it

Every decided game moves your rating by between 15 and 35 points, give or take a few for how the game itself went. Which end of that band you are on depends almost entirely on one thing — **how you have been playing lately**.

Your last 10 rated games this season are your form. Win half of them and every game is worth a symmetric +25 / −25. Win more than half and the deal tilts your way — you gain more and lose less, all the way to +35 / −15 on a perfect ten. Win fewer and it tilts against you, down to +15 / −35. There is no cliff anywhere on that line; every point of winrate is worth a little more than the last.

Your first 5 games of a season are placements and are worth a flat ±30 — the fastest the ladder ever moves, and the same either way, because a winrate over two games is not a fact about anybody.

**How you played is worth up to ±5 on top of that.** Carry a game and the win pays a little more; get carried and it pays a little less. The same applies to a loss in both directions — play brilliantly in a game you lose and you drop less, feed in one and you drop more.

That figure is measured against **the other nine people in your game**, not against a table of thresholds, and it is the only fair way to do it: twenty kills in a twenty-minute stomp is not the same game as twenty in a fifty-minute bloodbath where everyone has fifteen. Damage share, kill participation, KDA and vision, weighted — the same measure the scoreboard uses to rank a performance. Play an average game by your lobby's own standards and it is worth nothing either way, which is what it should be.

It is deliberately small, and it is capped so it can never change the *sign* of a result. The best game anybody has ever played on a losing team still loses rating. This is a ladder for winning games, and 5 points against a floor of 15 is what keeps it one — enough that a month of carrying shows up, never enough to make playing for your own scoreboard a strategy.

**Nothing about the other team is in that number.** It used to be: you were rated against the opposing side's average, textbook-style, which sounds fair and quietly wasn't. In a community this size the strongest player is the favourite in *every* lobby, so they sat permanently at the wrong end of the band and needed about 56% just to stand still. The top of the ladder wasn't hard to climb, it was closed. Form replaced it because form is the thing you can actually change tonight.

The trade is worth knowing: nothing pulls ratings back toward the middle *during* a season any more. That job belongs to the soft reset at the turn of the month, which halves everybody's distance from the base at once, in the open, instead of charging the best players a toll on every game.

• Both numbers are decided and written down when the lobby forms, before anybody knows who wins. The map shows you what the game is worth on the way in — the only things that can move it afterwards are the two bonuses below and the ±5 for how you play, none of which anybody could know in advance.
• The MVP takes a flat +3 on top of whatever the result did — winning side or not. It stacks with the performance figure: a game the room voted you MVP of *and* the scoreboard agrees you carried is the best a single game gets.
• A game the site never got a scoreboard for — one settled by the lobby's own vote rather than by Riot — is worth exactly the pair written on the map, with nothing added for performance. There is nothing to measure, so nothing is guessed at.
• A lobby that rolls high stakes doubles both of your numbers, to somewhere in ±30–70. It's the only modifier that can cost you something.
• An Aegis of Valour is the opposite of that one and the only thing here rolled onto a *player* rather than onto a lobby. It multiplies your win by 2 — roughly +30–70 — and cuts your loss to 8–18. It cannot cost you anything, the coins the game pays you are doubled either way, and the other nine in your lobby are playing the same game on their own numbers.
• How often depends on where you are and how you're playing. Around the middle of the ladder it's about one player in 54; near the bottom about one in 32; at A and above about one in 176. Rating is the only thing here that makes it *rarer*, and that's on purpose — an Aegis mints rating, and handing more of it to the people who already have the most is how a ladder spreads instead of settling.
• Form is what moves it back the other way: a winning run, a standing MVP rate, and being the underdog in the draft. A run is much the largest of the three — five straight is worth about one in 24 from the middle, and it's enough to take somebody at the very top back to roughly the odds somebody at the very bottom holds. Being highly rated makes this rare; being highly rated and playing well right now doesn't.
• **Nobody rolls one in a high-stakes lobby.** The two are opposites — one is the only modifier that can cost you, the other is the only one that can't — and a seat holding a halved loss in the one game where everybody else's is doubled isn't playing the same game as the other nine. So a high-stakes lobby is ten people on identical, doubled terms, which is the whole point of it.
• Ten people in one lobby are usually playing for ten different pairs of numbers, and that is the system working. The pair on your seat is a statement about your month, not about this draft.

There is no decay, no promotion series and no demotion protection. A rating that only moves when you play is a rating that says what you have actually done, and the three mechanics above all exist to make ladders feel busier than they are.

Placements, and where you start

Your first 10 rated games are placements. Your rating reads as provisional throughout — the site says so beside it, on your profile and on every queue row — and it stops the moment the 10th settles.

Placements no longer move your rating any faster than a settled game does. Every decided game moves it by the same band. What being provisional actually says is narrower and more honest than a bigger swing would be: *we do not have enough games to mean this yet.*

If you link a Riot account before your first game, your starting rating is seeded from it — weighted at 85%, so a high Riot rank starts you above 1000 without claiming the whole of it transfers. It's a guess at where to put you, made because starting a Challenger and a Silver player at the same number wastes everybody's first five lobbies. It is only ever applied before your first rated game; after that the games are the record and nothing external touches it again.

• Seeded from Solo/Duo first, Flex as the fallback. Unranked in both starts you at 1000.
• Linking an account after your first game changes nothing about your rating, which is correct — you have already told us more than Riot can.
• Separately from all of this: your first 3 games mark you as new to the room, so the other nine know to help.

The grades

The letter is a band of ratings, and nothing more — it carries no bonus, gates nothing, and is worked out fresh from your number every time it's drawn. Nothing is stored derived from it, so the bands can be retuned without a migration and without anybody's record being rewritten.

The bands are deliberately uneven. They widen at the bottom, where most people are and where a letter changing every other game would make it meaningless, and tighten towards the top, where the difference between the best players here is worth being able to see.

Your Riot rank, and why it isn't this

Your profile carries three cards: Solo/Duo and Flex, mirrored from Riot, and the in-house rating, which is ours. The first two are a record of a different game — different teams, different stakes, ten strangers rather than ten people you will be drafted alongside again next week.

• Riot's cards are read-only. Nothing you do here changes them, and they refresh on their own.
• The in-house number is the only one that decides how a lobby is balanced or what a game is worth.
• A high Riot rank seeds your first in-house rating and then stops mattering. Ten games in, it has no influence at all.

Which is the honest position: a Diamond player who loses in-houses is worse at in-houses than an Emerald player who wins them, and a ladder that refused to say so would not be worth keeping.

What the rating is used for

Balance, mostly. When ten people are drafted into a lobby, the sides are chosen from every possible split of the ten to make the two team averages as close as they can be — so the rating's real job is making the next game close rather than telling anybody they're good.

• The lobby shows both team averages and who is favoured, worked out from the same curve the settlement uses afterwards.
• A duo is pinned to the same side, which removes half the possible splits — so two friends far apart in rating make a lobby less even. That's accepted rather than mitigated.
• A captain's draft throws the balancing out entirely: two people pick the sides by hand, and the lobby says so rather than claiming an evenness it didn't produce.