It takes a lot for Riot to put even part of its hugely popular multiplayer game League of Legends on hold, but tonight the developer faced a technical problem it wasn’t able to promptly handle. A bug affecting every playable character in League of Legends’ ginormous champion pool began to surface in the game earlier today, leading Riot to disable ranked matchmaking queues while it searches for a solution.
League of Legends players first started to notice the bug on the champion Riven. It was allowing her to teleport back to base instantaneously using a universally available spell called ”recall” that’s supposed to charge up for a few seconds before triggering:
The fact that recalling takes a few seconds is key. Pressing “B” means that you leave yourself vulnerable to any number of bad things that might (and probably will) happen to you.
Riot normally deals with issues like this by disabling a select champion while it tries to sort things out behind the scenes. But once the Riven recall bug surfaced online, other League players reported similar issues with champion after champion in the game, until it became clear that this was a much bigger issue than the average League hiccup.
“We’re currently working to fix a bug with the Recall spell,” Riot wrote in a post on its live status page for the North American League servers at 9:08 PM tonight. “Unfortunately, this particular issue can’t be mitigated by disabling a specific champion or item so we’ve temporarily disabled Ranked while we develop a solution. We will update you all with our progress in 12 hours.”
12 hours. You could play 12 or more games of League in that amount of time!
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