League of Legends took a big hit last night thanks to a bug affecting a standard teleporting move that every playable character regularly uses. While Riot still hasn’t gotten its hugely popular multiplayer game back up to full speed quite yet, the developer said that it’s now found a fix.
The bug was first discovered yesterday on the champion Riven. It allows her to teleport to and from her team’s base almost instantaneously using a spell called “recall.” The ability is normally supposed to take a few seconds to charge up before transporting a champion back to base, leaving them unable to attack or defend themselves for a precious few seconds:
Recall is a standard move that’s available to every champion in League of Legends, though, so after the initial Riven bug surfaced online, many other players began to highlight similar issues with other in-game characters. People found they were suddenly able to do game-breaking things like, say, keep attacking while waiting to recall:
This meant that a champion like the scorpion monster Skarner could use one of his special abilities to grab an enemy champion and take them along for the light-speed ride back to base:
In other cases, the recall bug would teleport champions to and from their base instantly, even making them show up on the game’s map at a much higher altitude than they normally do:
The bug ultimate proved so pervasive that Riot was forced to temporarily disable ranked League matches across all of the game’s many regional servers.
This afternoon, Riot said that it’s figured out a “Recall spell code fix” and had successfully tested it on “a subset of Champions.”
“We are iterating through the remaining Champions to verify resolution and no new game-breaking issues are introduced with this fix,” a Riot representative said in a post on the company’s live service status site.
For the time being, players still have normal un-ranked games to fuel their League addictions. And many hilarious new video clips of the bug in action.
UPDATE (2:50 pm): Riot said “we’ve tested our fix against the majority of champions in the time since our last update. We’re finishing testing on the remaining few and will have another update within the next few hours.”