Yesterday afternoon we lost servers for a brief restart period, which is kind of expected after a decent patch day. Tonight, though, they’re down again, and I don’t know how you feel about it, but I’m fed up.

One of the most infuriating pieces of the server instability is Riot’s constant crowing about the quality of the free game they provide. For me, the game isn’t free – I’ve paid more than retail price for an average game for skins over the past nine months – and it’s a big slap in the face to say that the game is good for being free. It’s also frustrating that there’s been no word about the leaves people get from server disconnects. On a macro level, I think it’s safe to say most players don’t experience those problems. On an individual level, though, I think Riot isn’t delivering a quality experience. For every five players with a fine experience I’d bet you can find one with a terrible experience at some point during a given week.

The worst part of it all, of course, is that Riot has made a great game. It’s so good that it will likely continue to grow at the pace that’s causing the problems – it’s just more players than the servers can handle. For now, I’m here to stay. It would actually take a lot to pull me away from a game I enjoy so immensely when it’s working. For a lot of players, though, I can see the downtime and Riot’s attitude regarding it as the final straw.

A few months back it wasn’t entirely uncommon to see the servers go down every other day for long periods at a time. Sometimes they would come back up only to go down again. The trend has returned recently, though to a different degree. The 5v5 Matchmaking queue has been down frequently over the past several weeks, which often leads to Busy status for the server.

So what happens when Season One launches? We’re getting a new client and a bunch of new features, all of which encourages more people to play and people who have maybe taken a break from the game to make their triumphant return. In short, Season One will be the most aggressive server load Riot has yet seen. Will Riot be ready?

Honestly, I think not. I hope we see unparalleled server stability, but Riot has proven itself to be young and struggles with the scale of the game. That’s not necessarily a fault – every young development house with a wildly successful game is likely to have this issue. There just aren’t enough highly skilled and experienced developers and support techs in the wild to support this kind of rapid growth. On the one hand, we can applaud Riot for its dedication to quality – only highly qualified people are filling company positions. On the other, though, it means we will suffer some frustrating times surrounding the game’s most anticipated features.

If you tried to log in yesterday, chances are you were met by a menacing image of Blitzcrank before you even logged in. Shortly after the patch went live, Riot had to set the server to ‘Busy’ to manage the traffic when the servers popped up.

That’s how things stayed for the rest of the day. I followed the Server Status forums hoping for a fix, but nothing came until 1AM EST when they shut the servers down for a full restart. Yesterday also marked the first time I’ve seen Riot completely shut down a matchmaking queue. I wasn’t able to queue for 5v5s for a couple hours, which meant queueing in 3s with a pack of players unfamiliar with the map. It was…interesting. I actually saw something other than the usual 5-8 characters on that map, so that was kind of nice.

Everything seem to be working properly today, though, which is good. Can you imagine the backlash if servers were down for the two days directly after a patch?

Sorry for the late post here today, readers. Between a couple new work projects and the iPhone 4G leak I was crazy busy today. Also, there hasn’t been much happening, but sometimes even that can be worth talking about.

I do feel like the community has settled into a pre-patch lull over the past week or so. New champions have been coming in such a flurry that it’s nice to hit that break in between patches where there just isn’t a whole lot going on. It seems to be a result of a few things.

First, Kennen appears to actually be in a good spot as I have suggested here and on the forums. Without many changes to the new hero people seem content to either ignore him or play him – kind of a perfect scenario. Second, Garen isn’t all that interesting. There was a lot of hype surrounding the other heroes and Garen just doesn’t have the same pizazz. I’m going to purchase him on launch and play him, mostly for my own curiosity and testing (and the fact that I have more than 10,000 IP banked and nothing to spend it on), but I doubt he’ll get a lot of playtime in my regular games. In my mind he’s a lot like Mordekaiser, with just a hair more utility from that silence. You know, I never realized how similar the two are until I wrote that (another post for the morning so be sure to check back).

Above all, I think the calm before the inevitable storm comes from the game’s maturation. From what I’ve seen the servers have been a bit more stable over the past week or so, and I’ve actually seen my ping improve by quite a bit in some cases. I hate to make the call too early, but I think Riot may have finally hit its stride. That’s not to say the game wasn’t succeeding – it absolutely was – it’s just that the success was outpacing development for a while there and we might finally be approaching equilibrium.

I was pretty excited to get some games in today. It’s the first day I haven’t had much work since the patch so I was looking to get some good wins in and push Kennen toward my Top 3 list. I only need to hit 33 wins for him to take Pantheon’s spot, so I thought I could knock out 5-6 pretty easily.

The first game I had another player pick my favorite midget. No problem. We also had a Taric, Jax, and I think an Ezreal. I figured Ezreal could solo mid and I’d let our Kennen 1v2 so I picked Warwick. Big mistake. My team couldn’t manage their lanes at all. Jax and Taric were dying repeatedly to a solo Ryze (the other team had a WW as well), Kennen was getting dominated by a mirror match middle, and Ezreal was getting pushed hard up top. I tried to roam and help out as much as possible, but it just ended in death after death for most of our team. Our Taric was 0-9 by the end of the game with only 2 assists. He was stacking Hearts of Gold.

The next two games went really well. I was quick enough to grab Kennen and I played well with him at middle. I was quickly up a few kills and by the end of both games I was on some sort of spree (legendary in one) and had zero deaths. All around good stuff. Unfortunately the servers went down and neither of those games were recorded on my profile.

Once the servers were back up I grabbed a quick game with two friends. I knew we were sunk as soon as I saw the loading screen. We were running Kennen/Ashe/Malph and our pugs were Zilean and Mordekaiser. The other team went Taric, Jax, Nidalee, TF, Rammus. Let me tell you, Nidalee is infuriating to lane against middle. I was outplaying her by all standards. I was harassing better than she was, I had a better farm, I nearly killed her 3 times, but between Flash, Pounce, and Primal Surge there was nothing I could do. She would pounce into terrible situations, I would lay down a combo, get her to 20 percent or lower and she would pounce away and heal. For her really bad choices she would have to Flash out as well. The game ended swiftly – our Zilean wasn’t great and really, we didn’t stand much chance against four of the most OP toons in the game.

Of course after that game the servers went down for the second time and haven’t come back up. Hopefully I’ll get some good games in tonight. Send me a friend request or an invite if you’d like to join.

The servers are officially back online and staging games. I’m in one now to give a test to some of the new features, mostly the new store. I would love to say I’m giving Kennen a go, but the store is down and I haven’t been able to purchase him.

Udyr’s running a thread on the forums to address the store maintenance. There is no ETA yet, but hopefully it will be fixed within the next hour.

I neglected to mentioned a couple new skins in the patch. Pantheon got a 300-themed skin, all shirtless, rippling goodness, and Taric got a crazy-fabulous pink skin, dubbed the Armor of the 5th Age. I have no clue what that means, but it looks pretty incredible. Nothing quite like marching down towers in bright pink glory.

On the whole, I’ve been pretty impressed with Riot for its support. The servers are rarely down, and when they are, it’s typically for short periods of time. Until recently, anyway. It’s no secret that there’s been a lot of server trouble since the last patch. I won’t blame today’s issues on the patch, not in full anyway, but there have been red posts confirming that the latest patch included at least one crash bug. Couple the server-crippling problems with glitches like double spell casting and I have to ask, did they patch too soon?

My answer is yes. Absolutely. Frankly, I don’t know why it wasn’t broken into to two patches. There was so much content that something was bound to go wrong, particularly on a rushed schedule. Granted, the community was getting restless for Pantheon and Gragas, but both in one patch? Why? Pantheon was obviously ready – the only complaint I see about him is his ultimate, which needs very little change in my mind – but Gragas is a confused mess of AP, physical damage, and tanking skills. He doesn’t scale well and fits poorly into most team comps. Why not save him for a later patch.

I wouldn’t bother writing this if it didn’t have me worried about later patches. My hope is that the Twisted Treeline patch will get plenty of testing before it flies through. On the whole, I’d be much happier with six hours of scheduled maintenance each week to roll out small patches than the 10+ hours we’ve had this week to fix the blunders of the latest patch.

If you’ve been anxiously logging in every twenty minutes to check the servers you can stop your wait. Everything’s back up and running with the reported changes in place. As of this writing the store isn’t functioning, so I haven’t been able to pick up Pantheon just yet.

I am looking forward to a lot of the changes, though. As a Gangplank player I was glad to see the change to Parrrley in that it now applies Grog Soaked Wound. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve crit someone to a sliver of health just to watch him run off. There is a strange bug in his attack animation wherein every few attacks he points his gun at the target and it clicks as though you’ve tried to fire Parrrley and it didn’t go off.

I will miss that 10% extra crit damage from my runes, though it’s not a terrible nerf. I’m looking forward to giving it a go on Pantheon. I’ve got a feeling that Heartseeker Strike will be a crazy opener most people won’t expect for a few days.

And then there’s Gragas. I’ve not played him yet so I don’t have much to say other than this: he’s HUGE. His skills seem to be balanced just about right for a tank – nice control with just enough damage to overbalance a fight. I’ll have to experiment with some builds later in the day.