No, the win rate imbalance between the Blue and Red sides in League of Legends isn’t in your head. Riot Games knows it’s happening—though not quite as much at your low Elo—and are working on solutions. It’s just going to take some time.
The League world has again been in an uproar over imbalances between the two Summoner’s Rift sides this week, with the furore sparked by one fan’s investigation into the win rate numbers. While it’s only just returned to the surface in the fandom, however, balance boss Matt Leung-Harrison said his team has been “investigating this for a bit now” and is already working on changes.
“We’ve been working on things to optimize red/blue side balance,” he admitted on X (formerly Twitter) on July 7, before warning League players that it’s going to take some time to figure out. And, he added, Riot is already convinced it’s not impacting lower-tied players in ranked play—only Apex tiers will really be changed.
What that means is there’s definitely a bit of an imbalance in lower ranks like Bronze, Gold, and Emerald, but things work themselves out there most of the time. In loftier lobbies around Diamond, Master, and Challenger though, red and blue sides can make all the difference.
We can look at the raw numbers too: In low-tier Elo games, blue side wins 51.1 percent of the time, which is relatively balanced. In Emerald plus, red side jumps to 49.4 percent and blue slips to 50.6. Then, Diamond flips the two and Master and higher dramatically sways towards red side (47.1 vs. 52.9 percent).
This has been the biggest pain point in higher Elo groups recently, with streamers like Frederik “NoWay” Hinteregger leading the biggest calls for change.
Dot Esports can only imagine the largest changes will be felt by the smallest number of League players around those upper echelons when Riot does finally solve things around the blue–red debate. The most likely update will come around League lobby matchmaking; Riot’s historically handed the red side the higher average MMR among its assembled five to make up for the disadvantage of playing on the wrong side with subpar camera angles and odd map perspectives.
That historic MMR help doesn’t take into account how much the Rift has changed after its bumper Season 14 update though—everything is a whole lot more symmetrical and blue side ended up suffering the most.
There will likely also be changes that impact the whole League fandom (Riot’s still cooking them up) but things should be a little fewer and farther between there.
The League devs have yet to confirm when these changes will arrive but judging by Leung-Harrison’s message it’s going to be some time yet.
