The past couple of weeks have been a bit rocky for Riot, with a patch deploying in the North America region that not only had a nice little of army of bugs hiding in it, but caused increase loading times, long queues and framerate drops. Some players reported Rune Pages disappearing, permanently, and others have found themselves unable to play with champions or skins that they’ve purchased in the past.
It all comes as Riot tries to upgrade the back end of League of Legends, updating the aging 2009 technology into something more versatile and powerful. The problem being when you roll out a change of that magnitude to an audience as large as League of Legends’, there’s not much you can do but roll with the punches when the stress test starts to fracture your carefully put together code.
Everyone in the NA territory has been given a 10-day IP boost by way of apology, making up for any missed First Win of the Days, along with hopefully providing a bit of a salve to those players who have missed out on the experience they devote so much of their lives to.
Controversy popped up, however, when those players who’d been affected by Rune Pages disappearing (reportedly less than 0.5% of the NA audience) were compensated with 1000 RP. Riot kept this somewhat quiet, so when it actually broke on the forums it seemed like they were trying to keep it a secret, and, inevitably, all hell broke loose.
After continued demands for similar compensation be more widely distributed, eventually Pendragon, the Director of Community Relations, stated:
“I understand why you’re frustrated, but let’s put things in perspective – when you guys experience service interruptions or long queue times, we typically give out IP boosts. We recently gave everyone in North America a 10-win IP boost for these problems which is something that many companies wouldn’t do.
You may feel entitled to the same compensation as the less than 0.5% of North American players who experienced content loss, and if so, we’re sorry to disappoint you.
Right now our focus is to continue to improve the current state of the service and to prevent future incidents from occurring.”
Which has been met by a lukewarm response, to say the least. And while it’s understandable that people are upset at not being able to play a game that many of them have paid for, at the same time to expect a developer to essentially start handing out free money is bordering on ludicrous. The misstep was keeping the compensation given to those who lost Rune Pages quiet; it made it into a backroom deal, something that maybe the rest of the players could get in on.
As of now, Riot are working to fix all of the issues found in the latest patch, before deploying it internationally. Everyone outside of North America should be able to play unhindered for the moment, and hopefully by the time the patch gets over to the EU, it’ll be properly ironed out and bug-free. That’d be nice.