League of Legends Issues

A couple weeks ago League of Legends tried to update their North American servers with a new patch. It failed spectacularly and they ended up having to roll back the patch after a day of widespread connection issues. They tried again last week and it again failed spectacularly. I guess they decided another rollback wasn't going to be a good idea so they charged forward at full speed...

It turns out they'd made some sort of change to the way they were accessing their database and they did a very bad job of it. It couldn't operate properly under load so when 'millions' of people started playing at the same time disaster struck. Massive lag and disconnect issues forced them to put a cap on the number of concurrent users. This resulted in 3+ hour queues to get into the game at all.

But that's not the worst part... It seems whatever they did to the database also caused them to lose some of it from the production servers. Some people lost all their purchased runes. Some lost all their champions. Some lost all their built mastery trees. Which used to be saved locally but were recently changed to be stored online... Personally I lost all my champions and my mastery trees but kept my runes. Because I didn't have any champions I could no longer really play the game. I could use the 10 free champions but I wasn't allowed to do any drafts (6 champions get banned and 9 other people pick champions so you need to have access to at least 16 champions in order to guarantee an option if you're an unlucky last pick).

Over the weekend I was going through LoL withdrawl so Robb and I started new accounts in Europe. I was thinking my ping would be terrible but it turns out I have 90ms ping in NA and 120 in EUW so it wasn't that bad. I didn't own any champions there, either, but at least there wasn't a 3 hour queue. Also Robb couldn't even log onto NA even if we wanted to wait 3 hours. It was interesting playing again with no runes, masteries, ignite, or flash. At level 3 Riot gave me 400 RP which let me buy a champion so I got to play with Poppy instead of the free ones. POPPY!

At any rate, my account finally got restored late last night and I'm able to play again. They also gave everyone who lost stuff 1000 free RP. That's about $7 worth, so that's not nothing. I'm not sure it provides enough happiness to make up for not being able to play for a week, but it's not nothing.