Summoners!
With League of Legends fans setting viewership records in the Western world for the League of Legends Season One Championship, we're as excited as you are to kick Season Two off in style. As you've helped us become one of the most popular online titles to date, we thought it was only appropriate that League of Legends Season Two should boast the largest prize pool in eSports.
The League of Legends Season Two prize pool will feature a record setting $5 million prize pool!
Summoners!
Now that Season One is coming to a close, this is a great time to update you all on some amazing accomplishments that you have helped make possible.
The first time we discussed League of Legends’ growth was back in August of 2010. The number of players enjoying the game then was impressive, but since then our phenomenal rate of growth has increased.
Summoners!
Over the last couple of months we’ve been working on an action plan to drastically reduce the amount of service impacting issues affecting our European platform. We’re finally at a point that we can share our plans to bring more stability to Europe.
Presently, the PvP.net service in Europe is supporting hundreds of thousands summoners playing League of Legends at any given time – orders of magnitude bigger than what a typical massively multiplayer environment supports! And while we’re extremely excited by the enthusiasm and passion that you have all shown for the game, it has presented complications that we have been trying to resolve. Specifically, we want to reduce lengthy login queues at peak hours, eliminate our reliance on New York based overflow servers, and drastically reduce the number of unexpected server outages.
Riot’s mission is to be the most player-focused company in the world. League of Legends has grown from an idea to a worldwide phenomenon at a pace that’s both thrilling and humbling. Our player base is now several million strong and spans over a dozen countries. Unfortunately, this has garnered us some extra attention from cyber bullies. Some of which has been detrimental to your gaming experience.
You’ve probably heard rumors of the DDoS attacks that we’ve been experiencing. Unfortunately, these rumors have been a reality, and are a big part of why our service has been suffering. We’ve been working around the clock to maintain stability, but the malicious nature of our internet assailants have made that difficult.
In any case, we understand that the service that we’ve been providing you has been unacceptable and we will not rest until we provide the phenomenal service that you all deserve. So to thank you for your patience during this period, we’re happy to provide the following:
We know that the best form of compensation we could provide you with is consistently stable access to League of Legends, but as we strive to make that a reality, we want to give you this as a token of our appreciation for your patience and support. Also know that a long-term fix to these stability issues is on the horizon, and we’ll have more information regarding these coming changes in the near term.
In the meantime, thank you for your support, your passion, and your patience.
Summoners!
During this week’s update we experienced a complication that prevented many summoners from completing the patching process. While the issue has since been resolved, we know that many of you were affected by the additional downtime that occurred while we were fixing the problem.
And so, as a show of our continued commitment to upholding a higher standard of service in Europe, we want to offer all those players who logged in in the past week a free 4 Win IP Boost.
Thanks for your patience and for your continued support.
Summoners!
On February 19th we opened a new League of Legends data center on the East Coast of the United States. These servers are set as a spillover point for capacity issues in both the US and Europe. The center is already hard at work helping us reduce queue times on the European service, while we work toward expanding our footprint in Europe.
This new data center will allow us to avoid future downtime issues, both from sharp increases in player signups, and from any unforeseen complications with our primary servers.
In the meantime, should you find yourself playing a game on one these new servers, please be patient. We are currently working to add more servers to our European data centers as quickly as possible.
As always, we’re very interested in your feedback, so please keep us informed of your experiences in game as we continue making these improvements.
Summoners!
In light of the recent issues with PvP.net chat, we wanted to take a moment to address some of your concerns. Moreover, we wanted to share a few of the details related to the problems you’ve all been experiencing, and some of the measures that we’re taking to help resolve the issues.
When we initially built League of Legends, we leveraged an open source chat solution to provide our chat functionality. At the time, this technology was more than sufficient to support our player base, with plenty of room for growth. Unfortunately, as with many things, this technology has been a victim of the phenomenal success of League of Legends, and – even before these recent events – it has become more and more clear that it will not be able to support our ever-growing player base. Unfortunately these complications have been particularly apparent on the European service. This is partly due to the unparalleled growth that League of Legends has undergone in the last 6 months. Also, the European platform services fewer time zones than its North American counterpart, resulting in a higher numbers of players utilizing the service within a specific timeframe. Lastly, our European platform has a higher total number of players when compared to the North American platform.
Greetings Summoners,
I am very excited to share with you some news from Riot Games. Today we're announcing that Tencent, one of our international publishing partners, is taking a bigger investment in Riot Games. What that means for all of you is that we will now have more resources to develop, grow and support League of Legends.
We have been working very closely with Tencent, since before beta and they are now taking a majority stake in Riot Games because they share our passion for supporting our community and improving League of Legends.
It gets cold around this time of year, but even in this bleak, mid-winter time, there’s always something to help keep you warm as a cup of hot cocoa, a cozy fire, and a winter coat. In Valoran, it’s the Snowdown Showdown, so while the weather outside may be frightful, rivalries amongst the League’s top champions are heating up. We think that the following video properly captures our warmest wishes going out to you in this chilly, but merry, Holiday Season!
Happy Snowdown, Summoners!
We are looking for dedicated League of Legends fans living in the United States who are fluent in Spanish, French, or German, as well as English, to help us provide customer support for players around the world. This full-time paid position would require relocating to the Los Angeles/Culver City area to work at the Riot Games office.