League Of Replays

Greetings League of Legends Community,

We are extremely aware that over the last couple of weeks the performance of our servers hasn’t been as good as we would have liked. I wanted to assure you that service stability is currently Riot Games absolute number one priority. We have a team of over 20 senior engineers, system administrators, producers, and other personnel who are fully dedicated to improving our service uptime and availability. Answers to common service stability questions:

Is it really a huge priority? How come it’s taking so long to fix!
We definitely understand how frustrating the instability is, and I promise you – it’s even more frustrating to us. The core mission of Riot Games is to deliver the best gaming experience to the greatest number of people possible, and our hearts sink every time our service has issues. We are working around the clock, have 24-hour on-call schedules, and are spending massive amounts of time and resources to improve this area.

In addition to being a team of people who work on the game – we’re also a team of people who play the game, and really understand how frustrating the experience is for players. I know that sometimes it doesn’t seem like it, but stability has actually improved over the last 6 months, and will improve much more over the next six months – it’s just a really challenging set of problems to solve given how rapidly we have grown.

Why is it such a challenging problem to solve? It seems like plenty of people have done it before.
We’re often asked why we don’t just buy new hardware, or a second set of servers, and the reality is that these statements really oversimplify how our systems work. PVP.net runs on a very large and complicated infrastructure of hardware and software. We have hundreds of servers spread over multiple continents and many different sets of software and they all have to communicate with each other harmoniously. The problems unfortunately cannot be solved by simply adding or upgrading hardware, I can absolutely assure you that if the solution were that simple we would have definitely already done so. Additionally, even though the systems often appear similar each time we have system problems, each issue over the last several months specifically has been extremely unique, and has varying causes.

One of the most challenging aspects of our stability efforts is our explosive growth. League of Legends is growing rapidly, and the rate that we’re adding new users is increasing every day. Our audience has been more than doubling every 3 months and the growth has been accelerating and this has made it difficult to keep up. The good news is that we believe we are very close to having some major and long term improvements that will give us a lot of additional room for growth.

Why do restarts take so long? Can you just restart them at a fixed time more frequently so at least the downtime is predictable?
This really gets back to the complexity of our server infrastructure. Restarting the servers themselves really doesn’t take more than 20 minutes or so, but restarting the service is a lot more complicated than that. In addition to the simple server restarts, we also have to enable the appropriate software in the right order, pre-populate our storage caches, and run through an extensive battery of tests to ensure that everything works correctly when we it comes back up.

In addition to improving our overall service stability, our stability team is working on other things that make downtime less painful. These efforts range from improving the way we handle downtime communication and ETAs, to actually reducing the time that individual steps in the restart process take to complete, to improving our automated testing ability. The player experience is and always will be our number one concern, and we appreciate everyone bearing with us as we go through this growth.

I really hope that this information has been helpful. We understand how negative service instability is to the player experience and are doing everything we can to resolve it as quickly as possible.

- Marc "Tryndamere" Merrill

I discovered a while back that it's almost impossible to have literally exactly numerically balanced abilities. All of our abilities - and the abilities of basically every game in existence - deal with multiples of 5. AP ratios are almost always .35, or .7, etc. Spell damages are almost always 100, 110, 250 per second, etc. If you want to branch out into something like StarCraft, every unit had nice neat HP counts, nice neat range numbers, nice neat costs, etc. Would Anivia be more balanced if all her spells cost exactly 1.35 mana less? I mean, maybe?

With that in mind, you don't get to use a magic equation and put a champion in line. You identify issues. Let's take Heimderdinger.

Big issue: He downs turrets too quickly. The turret kills snowball the rest of the game. Heimerdinger's damage vs turrets is halved for both turrets and grenades. We playtest him; he indeed doesn't have those issues nearly as strongly anymore. We ship the change to live. Maybe he's not perfect, but he's certainly on the right path.

Players come back, play him, note the changes, and come back with a new issue. Heimerdinger camping in turret nests is problematic, and grenade bombing turrets with a Golem buff is still ridiculous. Alright, we'll cut grenade vs turrets altogether. We'll nerf his turrets from 3 to 2. But let's be fair here. Let's give him some cooldowns back for those late levels of turrets and make learning level 4 turret actually worth something. Also because Grenade lost so much functionality, let's give him a bit of AP ratio to make it more useful PvP. We play him, I personally "signed off" saying he was completely viable, along with everyone else in the playtest. I solo'd mid against the new buffed Kog'Maw played by one of our best players. Maybe he's still too strong. If he proves to be a problem, we can continue to assess him.

Generally, people have a good perception of general power, but a lot of champions have learning curves. If I could play Heimerdinger back during his remake as well as I can play him now, he might have been shipped in a different state. But we played him during his remake, he seemed effective and didn't have any significant issues. The same was true for a very long time among our community. Once he arose as a problem, we began to take stock of his issues and assess them.

If I can impart one piece of thought process onto you guys it would be this:

If you think a certain champion is OP or UP, try really hard to answer this question: What specific problem does this champion present that makes it too good / too bad?