I haven’t been on the forums much over the weekend, mostly because of the sheer volume of rage threads since the Leona patch, so maybe someone already covered this. I played a ranked game earlier today and couldn’t help but notice that the pick/ban screen had undergone a small change. Bans are now listed under the respective team that chose the banned character. The portraits are also small enough to allow for more than four bans.

I can only think of one reason to make that kind of change – Spectator Mode. The old system was fine. It was easy enough to understand and it certainly wasn’t the sort of function I would expect Riot to bother changing unless it was tied to another feature. The only feature that could possibly tie to would be Spectator Mode.

I hate to make predictions about this, because Riot’s timing is known only to Riot, but it seems like Spectator Mode could be right around the corner. I can’t say I’m dying to get my hands on it – I think the cases are rare that I would want to spectate a game, but it will be great for the competitive scene. It also seems totally reasonable that replays could have been the technical problem that delayed Leona’s release.

The Leona patch was a bit of a botch job, as I’m sure everyone is well aware at this point. Not only did she not launch, the patch also brought down the servers, led to Yorick being pulled from live for a bit, and generally made people pretty unhappy. Riot has said that Leona will be going live this week, which could mean as early as tomorrow. I wouldn’t count on it, though.

Apparently Leona’s being held up due to some technical issues, which likely means Riot will need to spend at least a little bit of time assessing her effect on the servers now that the rest of the patch has been rolled out. I doubt that happened over the weekend. Riot will likely take the day tomorrow to do some final testing and we’ll see her on Tuesday.

To pass the time, I’ve been finishing up my Shaco games for the week and thinking about next week’s Champ of the Week. I’m still not sure who that will be – I might contrast him against another melee jungler just for kicks, but I wouldn’t mind getting back to the lane, either.

I was more than a little surprised today when I woke up to find a patch preview from sometime yesterday evening. Then boom, servers were down and the game was patching. Leona was in! Then she was not. Then the servers were not in at all. Now we’re waiting out what is expected to be at least a three hour downtime. Bummer.

I’m really shocked Riot decided to release Leona at week’s end. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. As I’ve written before, players are used to the Tuesday patch system. To us, that is the rule. That is when this game is patched (as are many others). Why push for a release today? I know Riot couldn’t have anticipated the amount of downtime, but even assuming something goes wrong, Friday is kind of a bad day for it. Players are ready to dive into some games for the weekend, which for a lot of people won’t happen even hours after the servers come up. Once they’re live again we’ll definitely be looking at login queues, which are bound to scare off quite a few people. Waiting a day certainly isn’t the end of the world, but if I had my choice I’d be playing games without Leona rather than waiting to play games at all.

I think I would understand the decision to patch today if the changes were a little more interesting. Did Yorick need a buff? Definitely. Was Alistar due for a nerf? Yeah, probably. Did they need to happen as soon as possible? No, not really.

At the very least, this has let Riot make use of the forum feature that rolled out a couple weeks ago. The big red bar you see above appeared recently to alert players to current issues. It’s nice to have important information readily available regardless what subforum I’m viewing.