Apex Legends Ranked Roadmap: Legend Bans, Emerald Rank Confirmed

Respawn Entertainment used today's Ranked Roadmap post to lay out the biggest overhaul of Apex Legends' competitive mode in years. The changes land across two seasons — Season 31 in November and Season 32 in early 2027 — and touch everything from how matches are drafted to how the rank ladder itself is shaped.

01Legend Banning Arrives in Season 31

The headline feature is Legend Banning, enabled alongside Drop Zone deployment in Diamond+ matches. Before a match starts, every player in the lobby picks one Legend they'd like to see banned. Once voting closes, each nominated Legend is shown a ban chance based on how many votes it received, and the system then randomly removes Legends using those weighted percentages rather than simply banning the most-voted pick outright.

Respawn said the random-weighted approach is intentional: banning only the top vote-getters every game would just create a new, predictable banning meta, which defeats the point of keeping high-tier play fresh. The feature is aimed squarely at Diamond and above, where dominant Legend picks have the most influence on match outcomes.

02Entry Costs Now Scale With Lobby Skill Spread

Ranked lobbies will display a new "Lobby Tier" rating — essentially the median rank across all squads — as soon as a match loads in. Any squad sitting two or more Rank Tiers below that median enters a Challenger match and pays reduced entry costs, since their odds of winning are lower. Squads two or more tiers above the median instead load into a Goliath match, where entry costs rise to reflect their much higher expected win rate.

Respawn says it is watching this system closely during Season 31 to make sure the entry cost swings are large enough to reward squads that punch above their rank without opening the door to teams farming RP against weaker lobbies.

03Ranked Gets Easier to Reach, Again

Road to Ranked challenges are being removed. Access to Ranked will revert to a flat Account Level 20 requirement, the same baseline Apex Legends used before the challenge gate was introduced. Respawn's stated reasoning is that the challenges took too much time for too little skill verification, though the studio acknowledges the change could let more smurfs and new cheaters into Ranked lobbies and says its anti-cheat team is adjusting accordingly.

Demotion Protection — an existing but rarely explained system that grants three "shields" against being knocked down a Rank Tier after a bad Goliath match — is also getting clearer UI so players can see when it's active instead of discovering it after the fact.

04Season 32 Splits Ranked Into Two Leagues

The bigger structural change waits for Season 32. Respawn is replacing the single rank ladder with an Open League (Iron through Platinum, plus a new Emerald tier) and a Pro-Am League (Diamond, Masters and Grandmaster). Emerald Rank sits between Platinum and Diamond and becomes the new dividing line between the two leagues, with four divisions of its own. Rookie Rank is being renamed Iron and loses its special early-game rules.

Grandmaster sits at the very top of the ladder, and only the top 750 Grandmaster players at season's end will earn the Predator badge. Drop Zone deployment and Legend Banning will be exclusive to Pro-Am League matches, while weekly Ladders — the limited-time competitive events — are being discontinued entirely as Respawn rethinks what short-term competition should look like.

05Scoring Gets a Full Rework

Season 32 also flattens how RP is earned. Instead of kill value scaling with your final placement — a system Respawn says encouraged aggressive hot drops followed by "holding" kills to inflate their value late in a match — each kill and each placement tier will be worth a fixed amount of RP. Team kills will award full RP to every squad member regardless of who landed the shot, removing the assist/participation split and shifting credit toward squad play over individual frags.

Entry costs will also scale by division rather than by whole Rank Tier, intended to smooth out the difficulty spike many players hit jumping into Diamond. Open League matches will weigh kills slightly higher than placement, while Pro-Am League matches will weigh placement higher — mirroring how Respawn says the format should resemble the valuation used in professional ALGS play.

06What Respawn Hasn't Locked In Yet

Several pieces remain open. Respawn hasn't confirmed exact RP values for the new scoring formula, how many Legends can be banned per match, or whether Ban Protection will shield specific Legends from the vote. The studio also says Ranked reward changes — new seasonal Auras, revisited Dive Trails, and rewards granted immediately on promotion instead of at season's end — are still being finalized ahead of Season 32's launch. Treat all of this as directional until Respawn publishes full patch notes closer to each season.