June 27, 2019 Queue throttling is coming to EU servers too.
League of Legends’ new game mode, autobattler Teamfight Tactics, launched on a number of major servers last night, but players are finding that it’s not all that easy to access Riot’s take on the emerging genre, with queue times spiralling past the 60-minute mark.
Last night, NA players were told they’d be waiting at least 25 minutes for their games to start. Earlier today, senior gameplay designer Ed Altorfer informed EU West players that a similar fate was set to befall them: “as we head into the evening in Europe, we are seeing extremely large numbers of games and we have enabled queue time throttling. Expect this to continue through peak time. If the times exceed 15 minutes we will put up a ticker message.
Altorfer later confirmed that this throttling might be applied to EU North East servers too. Players were later informed that there were ongoing errors with matchmaking, and that Riot is “working to resolve them as soon as possible.”
To put those queue times in perspective, as a pretty-much bang-average League of Legends player, my queues tend to last three minutes at the absolute maximum, and at peak times I’m able to get into a ranked game after about 30-60 seconds. 25 minutes is obviously significantly longer than that, but it would seem that that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Hey EUW players:
As we head into the evening in Europe, we are seeing extremely large numbers of games and we have enabled queue time throttling.
Expect this to continue through peak time. If the times exceed 15 minutes we will put up a ticker message.#loldev #tft
— SapMagic (Ed Altorfer) (@RiotSapMagic) June 27, 2019
Over on the Teamfight Tactics subreddit, players are complaining about queue times significantly longer than 25 minutes. Players are being warned of long queue times as soon as they start searching for a game, and in some cases it’s taking significantly more than an hour for games to start.
As some players have noticed, this is pretty reminiscient of the game’s closed beta. Access to League of Legends’ PBE testing server ahead of the release of the current patch was pretty limited, with hours-long queues to even access the server, let alone start a game. Things got so severe at one point that some developers suggested that Teamfight Tactics was at risk of breaking the entire server.
Related: Check out our Teamfight Tactics guide (just in case you can actually get into a game
As pointed out by professional org 100 Thieves’ VP of esports Jacob Toft-Andersen, you could always go and play Dota Underlords instead. He claims that there’s no queue time and you can get into a game without waiting, but as a long-term League of Legends fan, I know where my allegiances lie.