Red Post Collection: 10/29 EU Problems Post Incident report, Elo boosting, and an adorable set of poros

Posted on at 12:01 AM by Moobeat
Tonight's small red post collection includes a post-incident report on the recent EUW/EUNE/RU/TR server problems, a discussion on Elo / MMR boosting, and Grumpy Monkey is an adorable poro art.
Continue reading for more info!

Report on 10/28 EU Server Problems

Here's Riot tmx with the post-incident report on the 10/28 EU server problems and a few comments on the loss forgiven mode:
"Summoners, 
We had quite bumpy afternoon in Europe, and I want to explain the issues we saw this afternoon. There were 2 instances of similar network issues that were related to our data center provider’s bandwidth and both affected all 4 of our EU platforms: EUW, EUNE, TR and RU. 
The first incident started around 5pm GMT, and caused player disconnects from games and platforms. We were notified by our data center provider that they were experiencing oversaturating problems on one of their major network hosts and were actively working on re-routing the traffic. This was completed within next 10 minutes, so the overall outage took around 20 minutes to fix. 
The second incident occurred 3 hours later and was related to the hardware issue on our provider’s network. Players experienced game reconnects and in-game lag. The initial reconnects occurred when our partner worked on re-routing the traffic to other providers, and then the second set of reconnects and routing reconvergence when the main link was finally restored. 
What is Riot going to do about it? Our long term plan is to handle our network traffic by ourselves and this will be possible when our platforms are moved to Amsterdam. This was communicated few weeks ago and we're on track with this project. We’re also working on short-term fixes and are actively communicating with our provider’s engineers to make sure their routes are more stable.

Additionally, I want to clarify the reasons on why some of your games were not loss prevented. The Loss Forgiven system at this point is a manual feature that has to be operated carefully because of its huge impact on the entire live service. It does not only prevent your games from being lost, it also grants half of the IP/XP points for victorious games, disables ranked queues and turns off the leaverbuster. That’s why we handle it cautiously, and always perform initial investigation to know player impact before taking any decisions about it. 
The problem appears in the way this system works: it only affects those games, which were finished during the prevention time. We usually keep this mode for the entire hour or even longer to make sure we catch up on all of the existing games. Unfortunately, we sometimes enter Loss Forgiven mode too late, as it can take 3, 5 or even 8 minutes to activate, and it's very likely to happen that some games are finished within this short period and your scores are not impacted. I'm sure we're talking about a small percentage of games that ended right after the incident started, but it is still frustrating. Yes, we saw numerous complains on forums, but I ensure you that the other 95% of games were successfully loss-prevented. 
We’re sorry about that, and we know we have some work to do to improve this feature. We recently applied some changes that will go live in 3.13, that allow us to turn on this mode on a single faulty game server. This way we are able to help players on this particular server, without affecting the entire shard population. The next step is to revise the global impact of Loss Forgiven feature. 
Again, this was not yet another EUW problem. This was the issue that hit all EU platforms, doesn't matter what size or location. Not on our side, but still being our own problem. 
Greetings,
tmx"

Elo Boosting

Riot CaptnPanda, a Player Support Player Behavior Specialist, has posted up a few comments discussing MMR/Elo boosting, how Riot handles it, and what kinda problems it creates for players.
"The battle against Elo Boosting commences everyday.

We get an extremely high volume of reports of Elo booster and Elo Boostees. We want to find justice for these boosters as much as you do. Our investigations on these players are very in depth and in some cases may take some time. IP addresses and Lolking scores are not as reliable as you may think and we always want to make sure that we are 100%. We do this so we catch the guilty ones and ensure that no innocent bystanders get caught in the cross fire [shared IPs, College/PC Cafe IPs]

Since the results are not instant it may seem that we aren't looking into this or that we don't care. Since the end of the season is near there are those summoners who are desperate for those rewards. This is the reason for the spike. As players are seeing the spike in games we are seeing the spike in reports and we go through and investigate every single report made.

As Summoners you have every right to help us find these boosters/bostees.
Efficient reports include: 
Summoner name - Of both the Boostee and Booster if you know but either summoner name will work. 
Screen Shots - It's not always apparent that a booster will admit in chat that they are boosting or a player will say they are playing on a friend to get them out of bronze but if it does and you screen cap it it will help us greatly.

Anything else. If you think it might be helpful to us include it in your report. With this information we can get to our investigations quickly and in some cases be more efficient. Every little bit helps."
She also added:
"Claiming to be elo boosting wouldn't get a player banned. If a player was reported because they said that when we investigated their account we would see that they weren't."
She continued, explaining some of the problems with ELO boosting:
"When you are confiding in a booster you are putting your account at a lot of risk. A booster can steal your account or get your account banned by the tribunal by being toxic while playing.

A boostee is also hurting their teammates. By being boosted to a division you haven't played up to yourself. Your skills are not up to par with your teammates which can make a game very frustrating.

Finally, you are getting rewarded for something you didn't achieve. This falls down to just principle. An average player could be putting in their blood sweat and tears to make it to gold before the seasons end. Weather they make it or not they get that feel of accomplishment on how far they've achieved. A boostee didn't get any of this they got rewarded for doing nothing. As stated before it falls on principle."

Grumpy Monkey; Poro Master

Grumpy Monkey has again popped up on reddit to share some cool art from PAX Prime - get ready for Poros!
"Some poro action. I did this one on Day 3 of pax prime. Thought I'd render and touch them up a little.http://cghub.com/images/view/695053/ and here is an imgur link (Thanks TheEnigmaBlade)http://i.imgur.com/ul3FFli.jpg 
Edit* Thanks to SneezeAttack for making this into a wallpaper! 1920x1080 Thanks!http://i.imgur.com/fLIYDrH.jpg"

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