

The new season is about to begin, this means a whole lot of changes are about to come your way. Season resets in the past have brought major updates, however, nothing too big has been planned for season 8.
As always, a new season will carry a wave of rank resets for the whole player base. This means all ranks earned in Season 7 will be wiped out, but don’t worry, your previous season rank will still mean something, so all is not lost.
After you finish patching on the 16th of January, you will be ‘unranked’. To get a rank in Season 8, everyone will be forced to go through 10 placement matches which will decide what division/rank you’ll get placed in. However, these placement matches have a bias towards your season 7 ranking / MMR (matchmaking rating), meaning higher ranks with the same placement scores will be assigned a higher starting rank than those with a lower season 7 MMR / rank.
For example:
Bronze 5 (Season 7) > Goes 5 wins & 5 losses > Bronze 4-5~ (Season 8)
Gold 1 (Season 7) > Goes 5 wins & 5 losses > Gold 3-4~ (Season 8)
Placement matches are still the usual ranked games format; however, they count MUCH more. This is because a single win/loss can shift your whole division by 1-2 ranks, 5x ~ the effect of normal ranked games.
To further boost your MMR / initial rank for the start of season 8, it’s recommended you duo with those you know can perform, after all, you REALLY want to win these first 10 games. Even better, try queue with friends that have a higher rank or avoid duos with those who are two or three ranks below you as that’ll lower your MMR.
Along with ranked reset, honor level for MOST players will reset. This time, Riot has punished those who currently are, or recently have been dishonorable, by making those ‘Honor rank 2’ or below, stay where they are. This means ‘dishonorable’ or ‘Honor level 1’ players will have to earn their way back to the base ‘Honor level 2’ which most of the community will reset to.
Similarly to the rank reset, the honor reset will also boost better ranked players with a more advantageous start. Riot has introduced new ‘checkpoints’ to make it easier for players to determine how close they are to leveling up. While most will still start at honor level 2, players having a higher honor rank in Season 7 will start on a higher checkpoint. The higher your checkpoint, the closer you are to ranking up.
Dishonorable > Dishonorable
Honor level 1 > Honor level 1
Honor level 2 > Honor level 2
Honor level 3 > Honor level 2, check point 1
Honor level 4 > Honor level 2, check point 2
Honor level 5 > Honor level 2, check point 3
Doesn’t seem like there’ll be any game breaking changes like a new summoners rift or new queues like they’ve done in the past, but they’re likely to make some big rebalancing changes to the runes system to prevent everyone from picking ‘press the attack’ or ‘arcane comet’.
As a fairly decent change, honor levels as mentioned before now have checkpoints. Raising your honor level has never been more incentivized, as every checkpoint and rank you break gives you prizes such as blue essence, champion shards and at the end, even the Grey Warwick and Medieval Twitch skins.