Over the last two months, League of Legends has been embracing the gaming spotlight with new champions, a brand-new auto-chess game mode, and a plethora of other updates.
Typically, the game updates every two weeks; however, the latest update took an extra week to ship out to ensure everything was in working order.
That’s because this update was slated to be one of the biggest for League of Legends all year. Not only did it bring tons of changes and additions to the new mode, Teamfight Tactics, but it also saw significant updates for more than thirty different champions.
While some champs had minor adjustments, others had huge buffs or suffered from mega nerfs. ARAM also had plenty of alterations and League finally pushed out the new version of Death Recap.
Overall, it was a big update for the popular game, and players had been highly anticipating it for weeks.
At 3 am PST on July 17th, the servers went down for maintenance, and by morning the patch had shipped out – but it didn’t take long for players to notice that something had gone seriously wrong.
While Teamfight Tactics appeared to be running smoothly, Summoner’s Rift games were plagued with broken champions whose abilities had gone haywire.
The clown fiesta consisted of Annie’s Q infinitely stunning enemies, Lulu’s W sending Kayn crashing out of the game, and Morgana’s Q flying as far as a Nidalee spear with the hitbox width of a Sion Q, just to name a few.
Champion skill-shots were regularly flying right through enemies, no one could kill Mordekaiser during his ultimate because their abilities magically stopped working, and the new Death Recap feature was a mess, indicating not just incorrect info but statistics that weren’t even possible.
Runes were also not acting like they were supposed to, with many keystones going completely inactive or randomly changing between champ select and the loading screen – that is for the players who could even get into games because many of them were continuously kicked out whenever they loaded up a match.
League of Legends was complete chaos, to say the least, which prompted Riot to disable several champions as well as ranked queues while they assessed the damage.
🔎 [GLOBAL] SR Ranked is currently disabled and Ranked Decay turned off while we investigate issues with Champion, Rune, and connection issues. No current ETA to fixes but we'll share updates along the way. https://t.co/1sMIv5cNMy
— Riot Games Support (@RiotSupport) July 17, 2019
It took roughly seven hours before everything had settled down, and after an hour of double-checking and waiting, ranked play finally resumed as usual.
In the meantime, players took to the League of Legends boards to complain about the insanity, noting a shocking range of dozens of bugs and glitches they experienced. Some players also expressed animosity toward the new game mode, Teamfight Tactics, and shared that they felt Riot was letting their original game take the backseat to TFT.
In one board post, user Anime Fizz (NA) ranted, “You took 3 weeks to make a mess of a patch like this? Did NOBODY test it in A SINGLE SR GAME (all it would take to notice that the game was completely broken) in any of those 3 weeks? Or is TFT the only supported game now (as it’s the only thing that’s working right now)?”
Many players agreed with these frustrations, concurring that the number of issues the game was experiencing would take a least a week to sort out.
Thankfully, League of Legends is up and running as it should with all new updates in place as they were intended. Hopefully, Riot shares a full explanation about the buggy release soon.
