Ranking System, Season and RP in Apex Legends Explained [The Ultimate Guide]

You are here for a specific reason. Apex Legends has attracted your attention and you are wondering what this ranking system everyone is talking about. Even if you have played other games similar to Apex Legends you would be surprised to find out that the ranking system of this game is, to put it mildly, unique.

Apex Legends is a complicated game by itself (if you are looking to excel in it), with multiple in-game mechanisms that make the competitive scene of this game a real jungle fit only for the strongest players. If you add to that competitiveness the ranked mode, also put some prestigious rank on the top, like Apex Predator, you have the ranking system of Apex Legends!

If you want to learn about the Apex Legends ranks, the Ranked Battle Royale mode, ranked points and in general everything there is to know about the Apex Legends Ranked Play, you just found the perfect article!

We are not going to talk about ranked Arenas in this article since we already have a separate article about it!

Basic Knowledge for Apex Legends Ranked System

The release of Apex Legends Season 2 marks the start of the Apex Legends competitive scene. This is when we get the Ranked Battle Royale mode and the first Ranked Season. 

The Apex Legends ranked season is 3 months, divided into two ranked splits, in which the players have the opportunity to fight and compete against other players around the world. As in most ranked systems, the point is to see who will get to the top, in this case, the top being the Apex Predator Rank.

Apex Legends Ranking Mechanisms

The “Gods” of ranked Battle Royale in Apex Legends are Ranking Points (RP) and Rank Tier. These two mechanisms are interconnected with RP corresponding to a specific rank. Of course, we can’t forget (even if we wanted to) the entry cost mechanism!

 Let us look at each one of them individually.

What is RP in Apex Legends

RP is the life and blood of this whole system. The amount of Ranked Points you have represents how good you are at the game.  After you meet the Apex Legends Ranked Requirements and you are ready to play ranked, you will start with exactly 0 RP which corresponds to the Rookie iv rank.

There are two things that give you RP in ranked matches. Your placement and the kills/assists you and your team got. The better your placement is, the more RP you are going to get according to the table that follows. On the other hand how much RP is each kill is a complicated question that we have answered in-depth in this article. 

PLACE	RP	KILL/ASSIST RP
14+	0	1
13,12,11	5	5
10,9	10	10
8,7	20	12
6	30	14
5	45	16
4	55	18
3	70	20
2	95	23
1	125	25

What is Rank Tiers in Apex Legends?

The ranking ladder is split into eight tiers with the lowest being rookie and the highest one Apex Predator. Each tier has 4 smaller sub-divisions, except for the Master Tier and the Apex Predator Tier which have no sub-divisions. To get from one tier to another, or one division to another, you need to gather specific amounts of RP by playing ranked matches.

RANKING BADGE	RANKING POINT REQUIREMENTS
Rookie	0 RP
Bronze	1000 RP
Silver	3000 RP
Gold	5400 RP
Platinum	8200 RP
Diamond	11400 RP
Masters	15000 RP
Apex Predator	The top 750 Players in the Region

Each tier has its own badge, but aesthetics is not the reason for the existence of ranked tiers. They serve various purposes like determining the entry cost for each match and the Apex Legends ranked rewards the player will get at the end of the ranked season.

What is the Entry Cost in Apex Legends?

Entry cost is the Ranked Points you “pay” for entering a ranked match. To put it simply, it is Apex Legends’ way of making you lose RP. It might sound annoying (and it is) but at the same time, it is necessary to have a mechanism like that, to create a viable ranked system.

This Entry Cost is paid when you enter the match and it scales according to your rank and your rank division. The rank scaling between rank divisions was a change that came with Apex Legends Season 13 along with various changes to the ranked system.

In the following table you can see the entry cost for each Rank Tier. 

RANK TIER	ENTRY COST
Rookie	0 RP
Bronze	15-24 RP
Silver	27-36 RP
Gold	39-48 RP
Platinum	51-60 RP
Diamond	63-72 RP
Masters	75RP, with 5RP every 1,000 RP beyond Masters Threshold

An example of how the Apex Legends Ranked system works

Let us say you are an amazing Diamond iii player with 12941 RP. You get your crew and you join a ranked Battle Royale match and the game pits you against same rank tier opponents. After that, the story goes as usual. You drop, you loot you kill. Everything goes well until at some point you get third-partied from another team and you die (it’s Apex after all).

Your placement in the match was 5th and you got 3 kills, 3 assists, and 3 participations. The base value of a kill was worth the normal 16 RP and the participation points are half what you would get for a kill or an assist adding up to a total of 91 points from kills and 45 for placement. To this number, we remove the entry fee for a Diamond iii match (66) and we get the final ranking points you are going to receive, 70 RP.

After all this trouble, you end up with 13011 RP. The Diamond tier is a very demanding one, so you gotta step it up, imaginary friend, if you are looking to become an Apex Predator!

How does Ranking Up work in Apex Legends?

As you can probably guess, if you are looking to rank up you have to gain RP and cross the threshold of the rank above you. With the changes made in the ranked system in Apex Legends Season 13, we got introduced to a new mechanism that is the Tier Promotion bonus. A Tier Promotion bonus is applied when you cross from one ranking tier to another.

For example, if you get enough RP to go from Gold to Platinum you will also get the Tier Promotion bonus which is worth 100 RP. Not bad right? Well, the reason the developers added this mechanism is because in the same Apex Legends season they introduced Tier Demotions.

With Apex Legends Season 13 if you lose RP after the threshold of your division you can actually Derank. This wasn’t possible up until that season. In Season 12, for example, if you got promoted to Silver iv you couldn’t go down to Bronze again. That meant that the first division of each rank became something of a checkpoint for players that were not “deserving” of this rank. No such checkpoints exist anymore.

Ranked Split

In the middle of the ranked season, there is a ranked split. This means that the map that the players will be competing in changes but also that there is a soft reset on the ranks of each player. Each player loses 1.5 Ranking Tiers except for Apex Predators who go directly to Platinum ii. The reasoning behind the ranked split is to keep things fresh by changing the map but also to reset the Apex Predator cap.

The Apex Predator Cap is the amount of RP you need to be an Apex Predator. At the beginning of the season, it is the same as the Master rank threshold but over time, as players earn more RP the Predator cap becomes much higher.

The problem with Apex Legends Ranks!

Problems with matchmaking

If you read all the articles so far you might be impressed with the ranked system of Apex Legends. You can see many moving parts that are there to ensure the game runs smoothly and everyone is playing with players of the same rank. That is not entirely true, unfortunately.

Since the first-ranked leagues, the developers had to face a very difficult problem. Many times there are not enough players of the same rank to fill a lobby.

Even though there are thousands of players around the world playing ranked games at the same time the distribution of players is nothing but equal. The overwhelming majority of players tend to fall to the lowest ranks. More than 90% of the players fall between the Bronze Rank and the Platinum Rank.

So even though it is easy to create balanced lobbies for a big percentage of the players, when Platinum and Diamond players are queuing there is a big chance that either they will have to wait quite a while until they get placed in a match or that they might get placed with enemies much more skilled than them.

This might be a direct result of the next problem we are going to discuss.

Apex Legends system is too punishing

Thanks to the latest ranked league, the Apex Legends average RP of the players has fallen significantly and it’s extremely hard for players to get to the highest ranks! This happened thanks to the changes that the latest Ranked Seasons introduced, and more importantly season 13.

There is a strong critique in the community that the way Apex Legends Ranked works is just not sustainable if you want to get to the highest rank by yourself. If you don’t have great teammates that you communicate with clearly, it is quite hard to become an “Apex Champion” or even have a top 10 finish. If you are not in the top 10 in the match, your RP earned will be insignificant.

If the players wanted to reach the highest RP in Apex Legends it was always required of them to grind through the ranks. Especially the players close to the top had to play extra carefully. But now everyone is required to play like that, no matter their rank. The playstyle flexibility in ranked is close to zero!

Of course, the developers wanted people to work more for the win so they gave them incentives for that, and they fixed various problems that the Ranked Leagues had in the past, but with this “fix”, they seem to have created a new problem, which is arguably more annoying.

Is Apex Legends ranked worth trying?

Absolutely yes! There is no way we could finish an article with negative words about Apex Legends, we just love the game too much. There might be some problems here and there but the core of the game remains the same. You can still play as your favorite Legend and feel like a superhero while you are sliding down a hill while shooting at another team.

The ranked experience is there to simply increase your heart rate even more! The extra pressure you have when your RP is on the line is the thing that will push you to perform better in the game and ultimately this is how Apex Legends players evolve. Is it perfect? No. But if you are looking for a competitive game to push you to your limits, Apex Legends is one of the best games out there!