Dota Underlords will soon get another set of changes for its ranking system, intended to alleviate some of the unintended side effects of the previous ranked rework. For most players, little is changing – but for the folks achieving top ranks, hanging onto that position is soon going to be much more about skill than time played.
Once you achieve the top Lord of the Spire rank, you hit the leaderboards, and the mostly linear progression of points ensured that playing a lot of matches kept you at the top. As Valve says, the “leaderboard has a tendency to devolve into a list of players who play Underlords the most, and we’ve heard from many of you that it should be a list of who plays the best.”
So starting with the next update, Lords of the Spire will win or lose points based on the skill of the people they’re playing against – a pretty substantial difference from how the system works for players at lower levels. Additionally, those players will get a different bonus on hitting top rank, setting their score at 15,000, which Valve says will offer more “room to go both up and down,” so that “players won’t clump at the floor of 7,600.”
You can get a much more detailed breakdown of the math over in the official announcement.
If you want a more detailed breakdown of how the Dota Underlords ranking system works, you can follow that link for everything you need to know.