Every League region's top tier holds more long-stayers than the tier below it. North America's holds a third as many.

Riot’s ranked API marks each player in a league with two flags: veteran, meaning they have been in that league a long time, and hot streak, meaning they are winning right now. We read both tiers of six regions on four days.

The first thing in the data is the same everywhere: the top tier holds far more long-stayers than the tier below it.

Every row is positive, and that is the structural fact: Challenger is a place people stay; Grandmaster is a place people pass through. It is the tier you climb out of, in both directions.

The regions differ in two independent ways

The first is how sticky the top is. Korea’s challenger tier is more than half long-stayers; Southeast Asia’s and North America’s are close to a third. Korea is highest on all four days and the bottom two are always North America and Southeast Asia, so the ends are not one afternoon’s reading. The middle is not stable: Europe West and Vietnam swap places between 4 and 6 August, and the two lowest swap with each other on 4 August. Treat the ends as findings and the middle as a tie.

The second is how far apart the two tiers are, and it does not follow the first. Japan has a middling challenger tier (42.0%) and the smallest gap to its grandmasters (12.0 points). Korea and Europe have very different absolute levels in Grandmaster — 29.4% against 25.0% — and almost the same gap. A region can have a settled top tier and a settled tier below it, or a settled top and a revolving door underneath, and those are different situations.

North America is the one that looks different in both

13.0% of North American grandmasters carry the veteran flag. The next lowest is Southeast Asia at 22.9%, and Korea is more than twice North America’s figure. Its challenger tier, at 36.8%, is roughly where Southeast Asia’s is, so the unusual number is the tier below, not the top.

The second flag says the same thing from another angle:

Five regions sit between 18.7% and 20.0%. North America sits at 30.8% — half again as many of its challengers are on a win streak at any moment. Fewer long-stayers and more people currently climbing are two descriptions of the same tier, and they agree.

What we are not saying

This is not a statement about skill. The veteran flag is about duration in a league, not about how well anyone plays. A ladder that turns over quickly is not a worse ladder; it is a ladder where the boundary between the top two tiers is being crossed more often.

We do not know Riot’s thresholds. “Veteran” and “hot streak” are Riot’s flags and Riot does not publish what counts. Every figure here inherits that definition, which is why we compare regions to each other rather than to any absolute standard — the same unknown threshold applies to all six.

Four days is the whole window. We began daily collection on 2 August 2026 and the readings run to 6 August. That is enough to show the ends of the table hold and nothing like enough to show a direction. The window will grow; a ladder cannot be measured backwards, so what we did not collect is gone.

And the tiers are not the same size. Challenger holds 300 players in most of these regions and Grandmaster 700, so a percentage point means a different number of people on each side of the table. We give shares rather than counts for that reason, and the counts are on the ladder page if you would rather read them that way.