League of Legends: The Ranked 5s Comeback Has a Massive Rank Decay Problem
Ranked 5s has finally made its highly anticipated return to League of Legends, but the honeymoon phase is already over. High-tier players are sounding the alarm over a major design oversight: the mode’s punishing rank decay system.
As the community has pointed out in a rapidly growing Reddit thread, Riot Games has copy-pasted the Solo/Duo queue decay system into Ranked 5s. The problem? Ranked 5s is only playable during limited weekend windows, making the current decay rules incredibly unfair to coordinate.
The Basics: What is Rank Decay?
For the uninitiated, rank decay is a system designed to keep the very top of the competitive ladder active.
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How it works: Players in Diamond, Master, Grandmaster, and Challenger must actively play ranked matches to earn “banked days.”
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The penalty: If a player runs out of banked days, their account starts losing League Points (LP) daily until they play again.
While this system works perfectly for Solo/Duo queue—which is open 24/7 and only requires a single player to log on—applying it to a weekend-only team mode is causing massive headaches.
Why Ranked 5s Makes Decay a Logistical Nightmare
To ensure healthy matchmaking and prevent endless queue times, Riot intentionally limited Ranked 5s to scheduled weekend windows. This concentrates the player base, ensuring teams can actually find balanced matches.
However, keeping the standard Solo/Duo decay rules active under these constraints makes high-tier climbing feel like a chore for several reasons:
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The Calendar Problem: Because the queue is closed during the week, players have a incredibly narrow window to earn their banked days.
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The Coordination Problem: Solo/Duo decay can be staved off by playing a quick match by yourself. Ranked 5s requires coordinating the schedules of five different players. If even one teammate has real-life commitments over the weekend, the entire team’s ranks are put at risk.
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The Matchmaking Bottleneck: Long queue times, draft dodges, and match cancellations further eat into the limited hours teams have to actually complete games and bank safety days.
“Maintaining a high rank shouldn’t feel like a logistical miracle. If the queue is only open on weekends, our decay timer shouldn’t be ticking down at a 24/7 rate.” — High-elo Ranked 5s Player
How Riot Can Fix the Problem
The community isn’t asking for rank decay to be removed entirely—competitive integrity still matters, and teams shouldn’t be able to camp at the top of the ladder indefinitely. Instead, the consensus is that Ranked 5s needs a bespoke decay model that respects the mode’s unique schedule.
Riot could easily solve this issue by implementing a few targeted changes:
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Increase Banked Days Per Game: Awarding more safety days per completed match to account for the limited weekend schedule.
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Pause Decay Mid-Week: Freeze the decay timer entirely during the days when the Ranked 5s queue is locked.
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Raise the Banked Day Cap: Allow teams who grind heavily on a single weekend to bank enough days to safely skip the following weekend if needed.
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