Apex Legends Season 8 Ranked: Split Dates, Rank Changes, & More

Nafiu Aziz
By Nafiu Aziz
6 Min Read
Image Credit: Respawn

Respawn just revealed new information regarding the upcoming season 8 of Apex Legends.

Alongside a new agent Fuse, a new weapon called ‘The 30-30 Repeater’, and the new battle pass titled ‘Mayhem’, season 8 will also bring in some changes to the ranked system in Apex Legends. Similar to every ranked season in Apex Legends, this new season might also follow the exact same format.

The ranked mode is usually played on two different maps in two other splits. As of writing, the ranked spit dates have not been revealed yet. Since Respawn already confirmed that Kings Canyon will receive an overhaul, the first-ranked spit might start with Kings Canyon, followed by Worlds Edge in the second split.

There might also be a soft reset to the ranked system with the introduction of a new season. Only 500 players in the Master lobby get the prestigious Predator rank. With the start of season 8, players are going to start grinding their way to the top on February 2.

Read More: Apex Legends season 8 introduces a new weapon called ‘The 30-30 Repeater’

Apex Season 8 Ranked Split Dates

Kings Canyon crashes back into the scene for the first split, which ends March 23rd, 2021. The second split will take us back to Olympus for the remainder of the Season.

World’s Edge is taking a break from ranked play but will return in a later season.

Apex Season 8 Rank Changes

A consistent and ongoing goal for the Apex Ranked team is to ensure competitive integrity through skill-based matchmaking. For Season 8, we are taking a bigger swing at some of our goals while taking into account a lot of feedback from the community.

Some of these goals for Season 8 are:

  • Create a healthier top end in Diamond+. Diamond, Master, and Predators are reserved for the best of the best. We don’t want to change that. But we do want these players to compete against more players of similar skill more often. In previous seasons, the player pool in Diamond+ was too small to provide fair matches consistently, so we aim to improve this by providing more opportunities for good players to earn RP.
  • Improve match quality for ranked matches. This means we are aiming to fill most, if not all, of the players in your Ranked game with players in the same rank tier. This may cause slightly longer queue times but more competitively fair matches. We think this is worth it, and we’ll monitor queue times and sentiment closely around these changes.

Here are the details of changes to the RP system designed to support these goals:

  • Earn placement RP earlier in a match
    • RP rewards begin at placement 13 instead of 10 in a match.
  • The kill/Assist count has been raised to 6
    • Earn RP for more of your kills and assists in a given match.
    • This is a slight nudge to give really good players a slightly faster trip back to their competitive rank while giving our top-tier players more ways to pull ahead of the pack in the Predator ranks.
  • The assist Threshold Increased to 10 seconds.
    • Earn assists for up to 10 seconds (up from 7.5 seconds) after dealing damage to a target that is killed by someone else.
  • Predator has been increased to the top 750 players
    • Allowing more players to enter Predator should improve queue times while remaining an exclusive tier for the highest levels of play.
  • Matchmaking Tightening
    • Players below Diamond will matchmake much more often within their own Ranks.

Finally, for Season 8 onwards, we’re excited to announce that Diamond Skydive Trails will be making a return as a ranked reward!

We always want to reward competitive players for the time you invest in Apex Legends and we hope accelerating the earnable RP will allow you to climb a little higher or give you the motivation to push for that next tier.

Apex season 8 rank changes
Image via Respawn

Season 7 Results

As of 1/21/2021, we have the following distribution among players in Split 2 who played more than 5 hours of Ranked (versus Season 6):

  • 16.35% Bronze (17.76%)
  • 23.86% Silver (26.23%)
  • 32.09% Gold (36.25%)
  • 23.13% Platinum (17.75%)
  • 4.37% Diamond (1.89%)
  • 0.20% Master & Apex Predator (0.12%)

In Season 7, we saw higher player counts and more playtime than previous seasons. This resulted in a healthy spread of players across all ranked tiers, with a notable increase in population in Platinum and higher tiers. We’re seeing ranked matches taking between 30% and 40% of all games played depending on time of day, region, limited time mode availability, and time since the last reset.

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Nafiu Aziz is an avid gamer and a writer at GameRiv, covering Apex Legends, CS:GO, VALORANT, and plenty of other popular FPS titles in between. He scours the internet daily to get the latest scoop in esports.