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.

For the past two weeks we’ve seen extended server downtime on patch day, a trend that bucks several months of mostly problem-free patching. As good as the last several months have been, I immediately think of the long downtime associated with patches before Season One, back when servers would go down for the entire day, sometimes more.

I’m hoping the recent extended downtimes mean Riot is preparing the servers, software or hardware, for new feature releases. These last two patches have been remarkably light on content. There have not been major champion changes and Riot has yet to introduce any major client updates. Barring those things, there isn’t much that should delay the update process as much as we’ve seen.

Could we see a client update before March 1st?

The servers came up for a short period of time this morning (about an hour, and access was set to ‘Busy’ from what I saw) but went down, and brought the mainsite down with them for a couple hours. Pendragon has now updated the Server Status forums with an estimated 7PM EST server uptime. Wow that is a long way off.

In the meantime, I’ll be working on my patch notes roundup to give you something to munch on while you wait for servers to come up. If you have Steam, Company of Heroes is $2.50 right now, and though I’ve only played through the tutorial, it seems pretty good. It’s yours for less than the price of a LoL skin.