Apex Legends: how Ranked works in Season 30 — Ranked 1 from August 11 to 16

Ranked matches in Apex Legends are stepping up a gear this week: the Leaderboard 1 of Season 30 "Hunted" opens on Tuesday, August 11, 2026 and closes on Sunday, August 16. This is the first of five windows published by Respawn for the current split, and the first to run under the new format: Leaderboards have been extended to 5 days.

The Leaderboard remains the least understood building block of ranked mode. It isn't your rank, it isn't your accumulated ranked points since August 4, and above all it isn't a goal you approach like a classic climb. The score that counts is that of your five best matches, and this single rule completely changes the way you play over a week.

A Leaderboard is not your rank

Two systems coexist in ranked mode and are managed differently. On one side, rank: Rookie, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Master, then the title of Apex Predator reserved for the top 750 Master-ranked players on each platform. It builds up over the whole split and determines your end-of-season rewards as well as the color of your aura.

On the other side, the Leaderboard: a weekly mini-league. When a window starts, you're automatically assigned to a group of up to 100 players, formed based on your hidden skill rating — not your displayed rank. In other words, you're not thrown into the same pool as Predators: you're compared against a hundred players of your actual level, and the top of the table is reachable whether you're in Gold or Diamond. Tracking is done in the Competitive tab.

The schedule of the five Hunted Leaderboards

Respawn has published five windows, all running from Tuesday to Sunday, with Monday as a breather between two Leaderboards. EA speaks of windows "extended to 5 days" without specifying the exact closing time on Sunday: plan your last matches during the day rather than late in the evening.

The patch notes present these five windows as those "coming later in this split". The schedule therefore stops on September 13: the Leaderboards for the second split, which will follow the mid-season reset, do not yet have published dates.

Three conditions to appear on a Leaderboard

• A minimum of five ranked matches within the window. Below that, you are not ranked at all — this is also the exact number of matches counted in the score calculation, which is no coincidence.
• Cross-play enabled. This is the trap for console players who turn it off on principle to avoid PC lobbies: without cross-play, no Leaderboard, no matter your skill level.
• Party composition doesn't matter: solo, duo, or trio, it all counts. A useful reminder for premade squads: a maximum gap of two ranks between members, or matchmaking will fail.

The score used: your five best matches, nothing else

This is the rule that should dictate your week. Your Ranked score is determined by your five best Ranked Point scores (RP in the original version) over the window. Not the average, not the cumulative total, not the net balance.

The consequences are counterintuitive when you're used to thinking in terms of climbing:

• A bad game doesn't hurt your Ranked score. It costs you rank RP — the entry cost is lost — but it doesn't factor into the calculation of your top five. A squad wiped out in the second ring has nothing to save on the Ranked side.
• A game that starts well should be pushed to the limit. Securing a top 8 finish with no eliminations is fine for rank, but it's a mediocre score in a window where only your five best count. This is the moment to take end-game fights, not to camp.
• Past five big games, returns collapse. Each additional game only improves your score if it beats the worst of the five already recorded. Grinding out fifteen tired games on a Sunday evening degrades your rank without moving your Ranked score by a single point.

Boosting a game's score: the official scales

Many of the tables circulating about ranked mode date from old seasons. The ones that follow are those published by EA support, whose page was updated on August 8, 2026, just days before Ranked Split 1 opened.

Each game first costs an entry cost, refunded if you finish in the top half of the match's standings:

The rest of the score is built on three levers. Placement among the twenty squads comes first, and it also serves as a multiplier: the value of your eliminations depends on your final position, so an elimination scored in the top 3 is worth significantly more than the same one in placement zone 1. Then come eliminations, keeping in mind that a kill and an assist count for the same amount, that a team elimination on which you dealt no damage is worth half a participation, and that beyond eight eliminations, each kill, assist, or participation is only worth half. Finally, the bonuses, the ones easiest to forget:

• Rank gap: eliminating a higher-ranked player earns a bonus proportional to the gap — +15% for one rank above, +25% for two, +35% for three, +50% for four.
• Top 5 streak: two top 5 finishes in a row give 10 RP, the third 20 RP, the fourth 30 RP, the fifth 40 RP, then 40 RP per game as long as the streak holds. Dropping out of the top 5 resets the counter to zero.

Worth noting, because it's a constant source of misunderstanding within squads: healing and revives earn no Ranked points whatsoever. Only kills and assists are counted.

What the loot overhaul changes in a ranked match

Breakout reduced loot quality across all maps without reducing its quantity: where you used to find purple and gold gear, you now find white and blue. In ranked, this shifts three habits.

The drop. Arsenals are disabled at the start of the match and only activate at the same time as the Evo Extractors, icons that were previously hidden, and their number per point of interest has been reduced. Landing on an arsenal to build your loadout is no longer a viable landing strategy: your first fights are played with whatever the zone gives you.

The hunt for high-end gear. Golden attachments and backpacks have left the loot pool, the hot zone is gone, MRVNs have gone from 24 to 12 and are now single-use, and wildlife only drops heals and ammo. Respawn is deliberately concentrating purple attachments and corrupted attachments in a few rare sources: locked vaults, World's Edge Trials — though the patch notes lower the overall tier of loot they hand out — and support packages. The Icarus bridge, also mentioned by the developers, is located on Olympus, which is absent from the ranked rotation: don't count on it this season.

The cap. The Upgrade Kiosk bumps an attachment slot up a notch and provides an optic if the weapon doesn't have one, but purple is now the maximum tier. Perfect end-game gear no longer exists: the gap now widens over resource management, not loot. This is also what mechanically restores value to Loba, whose ultimate is back to a 120-second cooldown, and to Rampart, who now upgrades 50% faster on locked hop-ups.

Map rotation dictates your schedule

In ranked, the rotation cycles every 4 hours and 30 minutes between World's Edge, Storm Point, and E-District. The special launch-week rotations — World's Edge locked for 24 hours on August 4, then 48 hours starting Saturday the 8th — no longer apply to Ranked Season 1, which will start on the normal rotation.

When your score comes down to five matches, the map stops being a minor detail. If your best performances come on World's Edge, it's better to schedule two sessions during World's Edge windows than six sessions at random. Check the map displayed in the lobby before starting a queue: a 4.5-hour window leaves plenty of time to string together five clean matches.

The four reward tiers

At the close of a Ranked period, your position within your group of 100 determines your tier, and rewards are paid out shortly after the window ends.

EA does not detail the content of these rewards on its support page, and the Trials patch notes don't say any more about it either: at this stage, only the attribution mechanism is official. Keep in mind above all that tier 1 represents the top 10% of your group, meaning around ten players at most, selected according to your own skill level: this is an achievable goal, far from the top of the overall leaderboard.

A plan for the August 11–16 window

• Tuesday: get your five placement matches in as soon as possible, without forcing it. The goal is to get ranked, not to blow out your score on the first try.
• Wednesday and Thursday: play only during your favorite map's time slots, as a trio if possible. This is where you replace your weakest scores.
• Friday and Saturday: these are the evenings when top 5 streaks pay off the most, since the bonus climbs up to 40 RP per match. An intact streak weighs more heavily over two matches than two fights won in zone 1.
• Sunday: last window before the cutoff. If your five matches are solid, stop there — playing beyond that can no longer raise your Ranked score, but it can cost you RP just days before Ranked Split 2.

Two matters remain open for the rest of the season. First, the second split, whose rank reset and Ranked windows have not yet been announced. Second, matchmaking: Respawn ran two tests in Season 29 — restricting premade squads to a single rank gap and a solo queue starting at Diamond — and has announced a blog post on the results and next steps in the coming weeks. If either of these rules is kept, it will change the way Ranked is played far more deeply than any scoring adjustment.