Ranked 5s Is Back, and Riot Fixed the Thing That Killed It

Ranked 5s is coming back to League. For anyone who remembers grinding a full five-stack on Summoner’s Rift, that sentence hits a nostalgia nerve. Riot announced the return in its May 27 Dev Update. The version coming back has some clever tweaks aimed straight at the problem that buried it the first time.

There is a catch, though. It is an experiment, it runs on weekends only, and it is not permanent yet.

What Ranked 5s actually is

If you missed its first life, Ranked 5s is a Summoner’s Rift queue for premade groups of five players, where everyone still carries an individual rank. You and four friends queue together against another team of five.

Riot sunset it years ago for one brutal reason. Matchmaking could not consistently find teams of similar skill, so queue times ballooned. Wait twenty minutes for a game and most people stop queuing. Riot says matchmaking has improved enough since then to deliver the experience players have missed. They laid out the details in the Return of Ranked 5s dev blog.

The pitch from Riot is simple and a little sentimental. They think League is at its best as a team game, and getting five people working toward one goal is the peak of it. Hard to argue.

What is new this time

Riot made four changes to dodge the old death spiral.

First, no fixed teams. You do not need the same five every time. Getting a consistent roster together is hard, so this version lets you queue with any group of friends. That alone should fix most of the “we can never get everyone online” problem.

Second, any rank can queue together. Riot decided the joy of playing with your friends matters more than tight skill matching, so a Challenger and a Silver can group up. They built in mechanisms to balance teams with big internal skill gaps, aiming for fairer games overall.

Third, weekend windows only. This is the smart bit. Ranked 5s runs in set time slots on weekends, so interested players show up at the same time. That grows the queue pool and gives the matchmaker more teams to work with. For most regions, including North America, EU West and EUNE, the window is 9:00 PM to 1:00 AM local time. Korea, Japan, Brazil, Oceania and the rest get the same 9 PM to 1 AM slot in their own zones.

Fourth, Tournament Draft. Instead of standard ranked draft, Ranked 5s uses the 3 bans, 3 picks, 2 bans, 2 picks structure. Riot wants teams to strategize together, protect counterpicks, and adapt mid-draft the way real competitive teams do.

What about smurfs and boosting?

Mixing any ranks together raises the obvious worry: boosting. Riot addressed it head-on. Their smurf and boost detection has come a long way. They have already cracked down on the classic Flex queue scheme, where one Challenger account sits next to four Diamond accounts that Challenger-level players control. They plan to apply those same detections to Ranked 5s and monitor games as it runs.

Will that be enough? Honestly, we will find out. Any-rank grouping is the feature most likely to get abused, and it is also the feature that makes the queue fun for friend groups. Riot is betting their detection is good enough to keep both.

Rewards and the honest caveat

There is a carrot. Everyone who plays gets an icon regardless of rank, plus a unique banner reflecting your peak rank if you hit Gold or above.

But Riot made one thing clear: this is not set in stone. Ranked 5s runs as an experiment for a few weeks, and they expect it to evolve based on feedback. It was one of several reveals from the same Dev Update, which also confirmed the new champion Locke and the MSI Daejeon dates. So if you love the queue, tell them, because whether it sticks around depends on how this trial goes.

Will it stick?

The weekend-window idea is the part that makes me optimistic. The original Ranked 5s did not fail because the concept was bad. It failed because the queue was empty. Funneling everyone into the same time slots is the most direct fix for that. It is the kind of obvious-in-hindsight solution that should have shipped years ago.

The any-rank grouping is the gamble. If boosting stays under control, this is a genuinely great way for mixed friend groups to play ranked together. If it does not, expect Riot to tighten the rules fast. The same patch cycle also reworks ARAM, covered in our ARAM Mayhem Season 2 Act 2 piece. The latest live changes sit in our Patch 26.11 notes breakdown.

So text the squad. The window opens on weekends, and there is no telling how long it stays open. Everything League lives on our League of Legends news hub.