My first five ranked matches went surprisingly well. My teammates were (mostly) competent and I walked away 5-0, feeling good. Number six was a little rough.

I queued up with Everett and we jumped into a game. At the loading screen it looked a little ugly. We had a Gangplank, which I never trust anymore, and our teammates were struggling to keep up from level one. The enemy Fiddlesticks was completely dominating the game, up to 17 stacks on his Mejai’s at one point – it was bad.

We got lucky, though. Around level 12 their Taric started to chain-DC, giving us a chance to farm up and come back to win. I felt bad for the other guys, but we really did have a better late game team.

Number seven was my first loss, made all the more frustrating by unbearable lag. From what I’ve heard it’s only the ranked queue, but the lag is such that at times I would see two second delay from the time I clicked to the time I casted. The other team had it too, but they were much tankier than we were and could last through the lag spikes much better.

I wouldn’t care nearly as much about the lag if it weren’t in ranked play. Ranked matches are meant to provide a forum for players to show off their best skills and have a ranking that reflects those efforts. When you introduce massive server side lag, you pretty much negate the chances of that happening.

I seriously cannot fathom the answer to that question. Originally it looked as though Riot was going to let players self-rank for the early games. You would select a box, as it shows in the pic above, placing you with players who had selected similar ranks. Apparently that didn’t go through, though. I’ve been paired with people in their 20s in both games I’ve played so far. I’ve also had rage quitters on the opposing team in both games.

This really doesn’t make for a fun initial experience for everyone. I hate to be the guy crowing about ELO, but as mentioned previously, I’m in the top 3000 player base, potentially as high as top 1500. There’s no way I should be playing with level 22s. It’s not fun for me. It’s not fun for them. One of the things I love most about this game is the competitive environment and it’s totally out the window with an ELO reset.

There is a chance ELO has been marginally reset, meaning they may have just normalized everyone’s ELO a bit to give some players a fresh start, but still try to pair you by level and some measure of your skill. I will say, judging by the players I’ve seen thus far, it doesn’t look as though that’s the case.

Are you guys experiencing severe skill gaps?

I know, I know – I promised to be online around 9:30 and here it is 10:15 and I’m still not in game. Trust me, I’m not pleased. My install has been…finicky. I’m getting launcher error after launcher error and I can’t seem to get the thing to finish installing.

We may be looking at a full install this evening. Not cool, Riot. Not cool.

I couldn’t really have planned this worse. An opportunity arose for my girlfriend and I to get out of town and go see family and it’s about the only chance we’ll have this summer so instead of playing Season One tomorrow during the day, I’ll be driving from North Carolina to Ohio.

As you can imagine, that’s going to delay my Season One coverage by a few hours. We’re leaving pretty early, so hopefully I’ll be up and running at my parents’ house by mid-evening and blogging as I go. Just so you guys know, I haven’t fallen off the face of the planet or fallen so in love with Xin Zhao that I can’t even spare the time to write.

If anyone wants to celebrate the launch of Season One in style, check in around 9:30 PM EST. I’ll be there, ready to play with anyone that wants to. You can add me at “The Wiggin Boy.” Hope to see you guys there!

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.