League of Legends’ Clash mode has been delayed until further notice. Clash, which was due to release earlier this year, underwent some pretty catastrophic errors during its launch weekend, and may not return in 2018.
According to a post by lead producer Riot New001, the issues with Clash’s launch stemmed from the fact that the League client was created quickly, and has had to scale up to the game’s size over time. When Clash launched, however, it became “the only experience in League that asks the platform to create a huge number of games simultaneously.”
Clash was a bit of a bump in the road for LoL, but it still makes our list of the best MOBAs.
Riot had, of course, undergone several public betas in the run up to Clash, but, as is now abundantly clear, weren’t quite prepared for that level of demand. The company proceeded to roll out tests in smaller regions, but there were still problems in Vietnam, Turkey, and EU West.
Riot is working on fixing those issues, breaking down the entire game in an attempt to debug the game mode and make it work in the long run.
There’s no official word on exactly when Clash will finally release. In the aforementioned post, New001 says that “getting Clash back to you remains one of the most important efforts for League in 2018,” and that there’ll be “a series of free regional tests before the end of the year.” After that, Clash will launch “for real,” but don’t expect to see it for several months. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t get the finished project until 2019.
While you wait, check out our League of Legends patch 8.14 notes – they’ll be well out of date by the time we get back into Clash, but they might help you out in the short term.