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Latest League of Legends patch introduces instant recall bug

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League of Legends’ latest patch has a small instant teleport problem. We’ve all been there, it’s nothing to be embarrassed about and look, this has never happened before, but it has meant the ranked game mode has had to be disabled while Riot investigates. While the cause is unknown, the effect is that every champion in the game now has the ability to instantly teleport back to base, rather than the long cast-time recall that is intended.

Patch 5.13 went live on servers last week introducing new champion and large fish Tahm Kench, The River King along with a host of fixes, updates, item changes and rebalances for the game. The instant recall bug was discovered in the last day or so and relates to how channelled casts work.

Whenever you activate an ability with a cast-time, a bar will appear and tick down until the ability resolves. This bar is also used for the Recall ability, which every champion has access to and returns them to their base after an 8 second period. Currently, the game is getting confused as to which bar is for which ability when two are activated very close together, leading to this:

As you can see, both the Recall and Nidalee’s leap ability are activating at once, sending her back to base and then moving her slightly up and to the left. Somewhere in the code, the 1s and 0s laugh. This may sound weird and mostly innocuous, but here’s what can happen with giant purple scorpian Skarner:

What is this,DOTA 2?

When the bug was discovered and widely spread through the community subreddit, Riot took the ranked queues down and had the following to say:

“We’re currently working to fix a bug with the Recall spell. Unfortunately, this particular issue can’t be mitigated by disabling a specific champion or item so we’ve temporarily disabled Ranked while we develop a solution. We will update you all with our progress in 12 hours.”

That was posted around 7:30 this morning, UK time, so expect all to be fixed (or properly on fire) come this evening. If you’d like to play with the bug there’s still unranked modes and custom games available. Fraser covered some other upcoming changes to the game last week.