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.
Our engineers have been hard at work on a replacement solution. While this project has been underway for some time, ensuring that we construct the solution correctly and that it will support the necessary scale is no small task. And while we are confident that our new chat platform will ultimately spell an end to issues such as these, there is still work to be done.
In the short term, we are doing everything we can to help alleviate as many of the negative experiences caused by our current chat technology as possible.
We hope that these additional precautions will ease some of the issues that you have been experiencing over the course of the past few weeks. Thank you for your patience and for bearing with us while we work to resolve the issue once and for all.
Scott Gelb
VP, Technology