i’ve been seeing a LOT of discussion about people climbing with a 50% win rate, so i decided to actually look at the numbers.

i pulled tracker data from recent games and looked at 10 wins + 10 losses for players at every rank from bronze through celestial.

obviously, this is a pretty small sample size, so i’m not claiming this is a definitive breakdown of the lp system. but the trend across ranks was pretty interesting.

we already know lp gain appears to be influenced by 3 major things:

a) whether you won or lost

b) how you performed in the game

c) your rank relative to the lobby

but there seems to be another HUGE factor:

where your mmr/rank sits overall.

bronze / silver

this is where the system seems extremely generous.

players can gain a ridiculous amount of lp for wins while taking relatively small losses. you can basically have a mediocre win rate and still climb pretty quickly.

my guess is that this is intentional. the game probably wants new players to experience ranked progression and reach gold without feeling completely hardstuck.

gold

gold was where things started getting weird.

some players were getting +40 lp for wins while others were closer to +25.

win streaks also seemed to have a much bigger impact at these lower ranks.

it almost looks like the system is trying to identify players who are potentially smurfs/alt accounts and push them upward faster.

another interesting pattern: players with fewer total games seemed to receive higher lp gains.

platinum

things started becoming much more balanced here.

but even in plat, you can still climb with a 50% win rate because the average win/loss differential is still positive.

so you don’t necessarily need to be winning more games than you’re losing to climb.

diamond

diamond looked pretty similar to plat, but this is where the negative lp numbers start becoming more noticeable.

as you get toward d1, you start seeing some significantly larger losses.

the system is clearly becoming less forgiving.

gm3

this was probably the most interesting rank.

gm3 was consistently the closest thing to a true 50/50 lp split.

if you’re winning and losing roughly equally in gm3, you’re probably going to stay around gm3.

you can still climb or fall, but streaks and the specific lobbies you’re getting seem to become much more important.

gm2

this is where the numbers really start changing.

gm2 was the first rank where a 50% win rate becomes negative on average.

in other words, winning half your games isn’t necessarily enough anymore.

gm1 / celestial

and then it gets ROUGH.

gm1 starts showing some pretty large negative lp losses, and the same trend continues into celestial 3.

TL:DR. YOU ABSOLUTELY can climb to diamond with a negative win rate overall but the climb will slow down dramatically at gm3 if you don’t go streaking. 

I Did an analysis Of LP gain at all ranks for a 50% WR. Bronze players gain +24 for Going 50% on average. GrandM2 ends up being -1 for 50% WR. Included extra details and findings.