Respawn has laid out a two-season overhaul of Apex Legends ranked play. These Apex Legends ranked changes start in Season 31, beginning in November, with Legend Banning in Diamond+ matches and scoring adjustments for lopsided lobbies. Season 32, arriving in early 2027, restructures the rank ladder with new Iron, Emerald and Grandmaster tiers, splits Ranked into an Open League and a Pro-Am League, and overhauls how RP is earned.
Season 31: How Legend Banning Works in Diamond+
Legend Banning is enabled alongside Drop Zone deployment, so any match containing Diamond+ players will use it. Before the match, a dedicated Banning Phase lets each player choose one Legend they would like banned.
- Once every player has chosen (or the timer runs out), each chosen Legend displays its chance of being banned.
- That chance depends on total votes: the more votes a Legend receives, the higher its odds.
- The system randomly selects Legends to ban using those percentages, and banned Legends cannot be picked by anyone in that match.
Respawn considered simply banning the most-voted Legends but rejected the idea. Such a system would create its own banning meta and work against the goal of keeping the overall meta fresh. The studio says it will monitor the impact on Legend selection across all games and keep iterating.
Season 31: Challenger and Goliath Matches and Other Changes
To make wide-skill lobbies feel fairer, each Ranked lobby now shows a Lobby Tier on load, essentially the median of all squads. Squads sitting two or more Rank Tiers away from that tier are flagged and have their entry costs adjusted:
- Challenger matches: squads two or more tiers below the Lobby Tier pay reduced entry costs.
- Goliath matches: squads two or more tiers above the Lobby Tier pay increased entry costs.
In Respawn’s example, the Lobby Tier is Gold. Gold, Silver and Platinum squads are within bounds, Bronze squads are Challengers, and the Diamond squad is a Goliath. Because the adjustment is displayed before the match, players can see what they need to achieve to break even or go RP positive. Respawn says it will closely watch progression and how large the adjustments should be, both to reward players who overcome the odds and to prevent extreme boosting.
Other Season 31 changes include:
- Road to Ranked Challenges are removed. Access returns to requiring only Account Level 20, though Respawn will continue exploring the exact threshold. The challenges were not as effective as intended and took some players too much time and effort. Respawn says its anti-cheat team is working on the integrity concerns that easier access raises. For more on that effort, see our report on the Apex Legends anti-cheat team update.
- Demotion Protection is more visible. This existing feature activates when a single match could demote you. You receive three Demotion Shields, and one is used each time you would lose enough RP to drop a tier. You are only demoted once all shields are spent. Protection ends once a single match can no longer demote you, or once you use all your shields and demote.
Season 32: New Iron, Emerald and Grandmaster Ranks
Season 32 reshapes the ladder. Iron replaces Rookie and is treated as a standard rank for all players, dropping the special rules Rookie carried.
- Emerald is new and sits between Platinum and Diamond. It has 4 Divisions, a new badge design, and will be added to Auras. It serves as the threshold between the Open and Pro-Am Leagues and is meant to ease the bottleneck many players feel when climbing into Diamond.
- Grandmaster sits at the top of the progression runway. To earn a Predator badge, you must finish in the top 750 of Grandmaster at the end of the season.
Open League vs. Pro-Am League Explained
For the first time, Respawn is formally recognizing its two main player types: casually competitive players and the highest-skilled grinders.
- Open League is where aspiring Ranked players compete, with the goal of reaching the Pro-Am League. All matches start in the Dropship. RP values for progression are being rebalanced to account for the new Emerald tier.
- Pro-Am League consists of Diamond, Masters and Grandmaster. Masters also has 4 Divisions. Drop Zone deployment and Legend Banning live in Pro-Am matches.
Season 32 Scoring Overhaul and Ranked Rewards
Respawn is overhauling scoring to make progression gradual and predictable, with RP math that does not require a calculator. Key changes include:
- Flattened kill and placement values. Each kill and each placement is worth a set amount of RP, removing the multiplier that let kill value grow with final placement. Respawn expects this to even out match pacing and reduce aggressive hot drops and holding kills.
- Team kills. You receive full kill RP for every kill your team gets, regardless of your contribution. Assists and participations are removed.
- Entry costs by division. Entry cost increases now apply at each division rather than each tier, easing the hard wall players currently hit when entering a new tier such as Diamond.
- Mode-specific weighting. The Open League weighs kills slightly higher, while the Pro-Am League weighs placement higher, more in line with ALGS proportions.
On rewards, Respawn previewed new seasonal Auras, new ways to use Auras, a revisit of Ranked Dive Trails, Epic and Legendary Apex Packs, and rewards granted on promotion rather than only at season end. Details are intentionally light for now, with fuller information promised closer to the Season 32 launch. Weekly Ladders are also going away in Season 32, to be replaced by a reimagined form of limited-time competition that Respawn will discuss next year.
Respawn says these changes are not the end of the story, and further Ranked updates will follow beyond Season 32.
Source: Apex Legends™: Ranked Roadmap, from the official Apex Legends Steam feed.