Rocket League: Are Rank Resets A Good Thing?

We’re a chunk of the way into Season 3 of Rocket League, and the ranks are sort of settling down again now after one of the strangest ranks resets in a while. You probably noticed that a lot of players had moved up in ranks despite not actually getting any better, and it’s the case at nearly every rank.

Well, it led to us having some questions about it, and in true Rocket League fashion, has also led to one of our favourite content creators putting out a video explaining a little bit about what’s going on behind the scenes.

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Should rank resets be changed in Rocket League?

The video in question comes from Wayton Pilkin. While he does touch on the most recent rank reset, the video actually mainly focuses on the original Season 3 in Rocket League. See, back then, things were very different. For starters, while Rocket League now uses soft rank resets, which is where you get put back a rank or so prior to your placement games, the original Season 3 actually did a hard reset, where everyone was plopped down to nothing.

Imagine if you had finally worked your way up to Diamond, or Platinum, or even SSL, and you were riding high on that feeling ahead of the next reset. You know that those first ten games reward you with a larger amount of MMR per win, so you’re confident you’ll be able to up your rank or do a little better next season, even if they do place you lower at the start of it. That’s a soft reset.

Now imagine you’d managed that and went into the next season believing all of that, but instead of being placed one rank down, you and everyone else were placed into Bronze 3. That means that you’re likely going to have an easy time beating down players of a lower rank than you, but it also means you could end up paired up with actual Bronze players in your placement matches and that you could be up against a team of SSLs. It’s easy to see why hard resets aren’t used anymore, but it’s got us wondering if rank resets and those placement matches are still doing what they’re meant to be doing. 

Ranks in Rocket League aren’t static; they’re meant to be a reflection of where you sit compared to everyone else. If more players keep joining then the ranks should keep changing too, but it’s a hard thing to balance when the general skill level in the game keeps improving too. As new techniques are learned, and more people gain access to them, it makes everyone a little bit better, but it also makes rank resets, and maybe even ranks themselves, a little less logical.