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.

I know the site is currently down, so you can’t really see these for yourself, but they aren’t exactly new so you may have already seen them. I first saw the Gragas Fail Whale today, when the servers went down after being up for just long enough for me to sneak in a game. As much as you hate to see this image (because it means things are broken), it still made me smile.

The other change I noticed was the Server Status forums. It seems Pendragon is now in charge of doling out the updates that no one wants to see (or can see, for that matter).

Riot added some additional graphics to help players understand the different champions you see in the client and explain the purpose between each possible server status. Hopefully it will squash a few of the “UNAVAILABLE WTFFFFFFFF?!?!?!” threads that pop up every time the server goes busy.

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?