The second season of Rocket League will kick off with a patch coming in February, which developer Psyonix says will introduce 12 new competitive divisions, among other details.
Psyonix outlined the changes in a post today on the game's Steam page. The 12 divisions (pictured below) will take the place of the current 10 (there's also an unranked tier for those who have yet to play 10 matches) and it will uncap the number of performers who can be ranked in the top tier (now called "Champion").
All players will be re-ranked, but they won't have to grind up through lower levels to return to a corresponding rank of play. They'll need to play 10 placement matches, and those outcomes, plus the player data that will be transferred from the first year of Rocket League, will result in a ranking under the new system.
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Promotion will not be an instant thing; Psyonix says players will be promoted "after your skill has risent consistently to the next division up." By the same token, relegation to a lower division will not immediately occur with one or two bad losses.
Season 2 will retain the top-100 leaderboard ranked according to skill rating. Also, to lessen confusion, "rank points" are being ditched entirely, and the ranking metric will be the skill rating from now on.
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There are more details and information on how all this works at the Steam page. Rocket League is available on PlayStation 4 and Windows PC, with an Xbox One version coming next month.
Rocket League, a critically acclaimed take on soccer as played by radio-controlled cars, collected many sports video game of the year awards. It was Polygon's runner-up, but we still think highly of it, scoring it a 9 in our review from last summer.
