Restoring Ranked Rewards
2025.12.09
Yesterday we announced changes that would shift Ranked weapon skins into the newly designed World Tour. After hearing from you, it’s pretty clear we missed the mark.
These skins have history. Gold, Platinum, Diamond rewards (and Ruby, of course) represent years of competition and pride. They signal mastery and dedication. Moving them into a general progression track weakened that legacy.
Today, we’re restoring them to Ranked.
What will World Tour and Ranked look like now?
To protect the meaning of these rewards, we are rolling back the update before Season 9 launches tomorrow. Here is the corrected reward structure:
Gold, Platinum, Diamond weapon skins stay in Ranked
Diamond player emblems stay in Ranked
Ruby rewards remain for the Top 500 in Ranked
Charms and Stickers stay in the new World Tour, which you also progress while playing Ranked Cashout, Cashout, or any other modes in the game
Emerald-tier rewards are earned in World Tour
Multibucks rewards are earned in World Tour
World Tour now refers to the main progression system for the whole game, and each and every Mode, including Ranked Cashout, will contribute to the Badge Tiers. You may also have seen that we’re switching weapon skin rewards to coins that allow you to choose the skin for the Weapon of your choice. You’ll see that shop in Season 10, when your Season 9 reward coins will be delivered to your account.
Ranked Rewards for Season 9
World Tour Rewards for Season 9
Why We Made the Original Change
When we set out to design our updated progression systems for Season 9 we had two main goals. We wanted to be more respectful of players' time and we wanted to ensure they would feel rewarded regardless of how they chose to play the game.
To solve this, we wanted all game modes to contribute to progressing World Tour, so we consolidated the Quick Play, World Tour and Ranked progression systems as much as we could, so most of your efforts were contributing to one system, rather than forcing players to play across three different progression systems.
In this process of merging these systems, we felt most Ranked players play for the prestige of achieving their rank and showing off their skill level to others, and expected that this could be achieved via unique Ranked badges and background for playercards. From this perspective, and seeing that most Ranked players would also be very likely to achieve high World Tour ranks with the consolidated system, we decided to move the Weapon Skin rewards across to World Tour so that more players would have the chance to earn them.
What we underestimated was how important these weapon skins are as the primary way Ranked players show their skill. Unlike playercards, weapon skins are visible in first-person spectating and in key moments of play, which gives them a unique role in expressing prestige. We missed that impact. Player feedback helped us see it clearly.
Thanks to your fast and earnest feedback to the Preview Event, we are choosing to roll back this change to Weapon skins before it takes effect. All the other changes to World Tour and Seasonal progression stay, and we believe those improvements will have a strong, positive effect starting in Season 9.
What Happens Next
Season 9 goes live tomorrow with Ranked rewards restored to their rightful place. Thank you for speaking up. Your feedback helped us protect something important.
We will continue refining the experience so that World Tour stays rewarding and Ranked stays meaningful.
These changes are coming in hot and might not be present in the images and text in the launch build for Season 9. However, we’re working right now to make sure they are reflected in the game as soon as possible.
//THE FINALS Team
