Proving Grounds, the new custom game only 5v5 map centered around the fan favorite "All Random All Mid" game type, is now available on the live servers!

Hey Dudes!

A little over two months ago, a number of developers and I participated in Riot’s first ever Thunderdome – a periodic, companywide event aimed at allowing developers to work on whatever they want. My team set out to make the Proving Grounds, our basic tutorial map, playable as full on 5v5. This is something I’ve wanted to do ever since I originally worked on the map, and with the help of some other devs (and a good bit of caffeine) we managed to get everything up and running. Everyone was pretty happy with how the effort turned out, and with the upcoming removal of Winter Summoner’s Rift we saw an opportunity to sneak the new map out by repurposing the same UI hooks.

We've been testing the Proving Grounds for a week or so on the PBE, and now I'm pleased to announce that it is also playable as a custom game on the live servers. While we’ve been playtesting it internally as All Random (and lovin’ it) for quite some time now, all the pick options will be available – Blind Pick, Draft, and All Random – because we’re excited to see what variation you enjoy the most. We’d love to hear any feedback that you may have, as both RiotNome and myself will be providing support post release. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Fellow Rioters who helped me sneak this out:
Bigbadabruin
chunkface
Drevarius
Kilmourz
RiotNome
Ponts
positron7
Riot Taco Storm
RiotTroyzilla
subninja
Veigar

- Brackhar, Technical Designer, via the official forums.







But Moobeat, what exactly is ARAM and why should I care? ARAM is a summoner created game type ( i.e not original supported by Riot ) that focuses around a team of 5 staying in a single lane and trying to bash each others faces in. There are lots of other fancy rules and such, but luckily Riot has provided us ARAM players a map to easily facilitate their hobby and prventing people from not following the community set "rules", such as not leaving the middle lane in Summoners rift and not purchasing certain items.

Solcrushed has been trolling around the forums and he gave us two little bits of information about Xerath and LeBlanc!

The upcoming Scorched Earth Xerath skin.

If you have tried out Xerath ( possibly awaiting the upcoming skin ) in the past few days, you may be noticed his ultimate acting a little funny. His ult has went from near instant to having a noticeably slower cast time. Turns out it isn't a bug per say, but an unintentionally applied change that was shipped without the intended buffs to compensate for the difference.

Hey guys, here to explain what happened with Xerath and provide some updates

First, the ultimate change was intended for a number of reasons: 
1) It brings Xerath’s playstyle closer to what we originally envisioned with the character (Constant siege barrage instead of instant burst) 
2) The animation was broken with the previous ultimate and we wanted to fix that

We were also aware that this was a significant nerf to Xerath and intended to buff him at the same time to compensate for it, what we did NOT intend was the animation changes going in without the buffs accompanying it.

We will be giving Xerath the intended buffs in the next patch. We messed up on this one and I apologize on behalf of the team to all the Xerath players out there

- Solcrushed, Live Game Designer, via the official forums.








Secondly, Mr. Solcrushed posted, in a different thread, a little tid bit about a mysterious "deceivery" buff coming soon for LeBlanc. What could it be? My bet goes that it's something to do with her passive.

We have a buff/tweak to her this patch that should raise her skill cap quite a bit and allow her to pull off awesome things time to time 

It's not going to change her damage output but makes her more... 'deceivery' (dis word is in troll lexicon)

- Solcrushed, Live Game Designer , via the official forums.

While I don't have any additional, cool spoilery stuff, I do have a few house keeping bits of news to share.


1) 6-29 Hot Fix Deployed

Riot deployed a  hotfix a few hours ago.  Lots of bugs were address, including the dreaded "oh shit Baron just aced our team" bug. Here are the deets, courtesy of RiotNyandalee:

• Fixed a bug that occasionally caused Baron to attack and cast at a faster rate
• Fixed a bug where some Champions were occasionally freezing during their jump abilities
• Fixed a bug that was causing various Champions to become stuck in walls
• Made a change that will reduce the number of disconnects and reconnects that players are experiencing
• Fixed a bug that was not allowing players to scroll using the middle mouse button
• Fixed a bug that was occasionally selecting the wrong set of Masteries when players used the “Edit” option
• Fixed a crash that occurred on the game loading screen

2) EU Servers Finally patched up to 1.61

The EU servers are now the proud recipients of a patch to bring them up to speed with the NA server. I can only assume they got the patch late due to the catastrophe it after being deployed, to the NA server, 9 days ago. You can brush up on the patch notes here.

3) Aura Items Displaying Range on Mouse Over

Phreak commented , a few days ago, that having items with auras, such as Zeke's Herald or Aegis of the Legion,  display their ranges is "an improvement we have planned". A nice little quality of life change if you ask me!

4) Premades To Be Matched Against Other Premades

Just a small quip from Zileas about Riot's intention to, in normal games and when possible, make premades match when more frequently with equally large premades  ( i.e 4 man premade v another 4 man premade, with a pug member each ).

He explains " Professor Doktor Lyte is intending on making it so that 4 man premades match vs other 4 man premades. This change should be live soonish hopefully. I'm not sure where it is in development, but it's important to us. I will check up on this tomorrow, but I believe we have implemented it, it's just a question of what patch it goes out on..."

Still coming at this with rough guesses, here is what his abilities seem to line up as  ( compliments of reddit and names possibly tenative):

 

Hit and Slow

Extra damage shot

Aoe Damage

Attack Speed bonus

Knock back on next hit

Shots go faster and do more damage when passing through

Weapon changes and you get some sort of bonus ( or passive trigger ) and first attack is different.

 

Remember the 6-8 PBE update? Lots of goodies came out of that one, didn't they? ARAM Map, New Skins, and some new splash arts. Between the Jayce files and the incomplete skin textures, there was also a lot of "not for our eyes" sort of stuff plugged in there.

Thanks to an anonymous submitter, we now a few more goodies from that particular update. This  generous submitter was curious to what else the patch may contain and chose to dig even deeper. Below are the fruits of his curiosity.

Obviously these files, taken from the 6-8 PBE Client, are bits and piece of things not yet completed things and I should remind you that everything I'm presenting below IS TENTATIVE.  I'm just going to be making stabs at what the files could be part of, based on their names relative to how other files are named; I don't have any sort of insider knowledge or anything.

New Champions Stuff:

Starting off, there are a few interesting names included in these files. There are a ton of files labeled as "DarkSovereign", "Diana", and "Xara" , so I'll start with them, as well as a few files relating to "Teek", "Seth", and "Hexmage"

DarkSovereign seems to be one of the bigger working champion names to pop up. DS has a load of abilities and animtions packed in including what seems to be abilities called "Void Ball", "Nova" ( probably her ultimate ability ), and "Q Missle"

Speaking of Moon themed abilities, "Diana" is next in line. She, too, has a lot of abilities included in the files, such as " Penumbra", "Moonlight Sword", and "Lunari (Pulse?)", as well as something to do with a lance.

Under "Xara", there are a lot of odd nature related files - "seed", "oaken enemy", "twilight", "vine" - as well as a bunch of references to abilities of other champions ( "megaadhesive", "eyeofthestorm", "sapling" ). Based on the first point, this could be the nature mage that Morello made mention of a while back?

"Seth" seems to be a sand based champion with only one clump of files, seemingly it's "W" ability as that pops up in the file name.. This is probably the "dry" champion Ezreal mentioned ( near bottom ) that is NOT an Egyptian god.

The next entry, "Hexmage", has very few files associated with it, but boy does that sound like a working name or what?

Lastly we have "Teek", who appears to have an "infest", "scent", and "invis(ability)" files. Perhaps this is another stealth champion slated after the work?


New Skins Stuff:

There seems to be a new "Greek" Cassiopeia skin in the works. This should ring out pretty well with the community as Cass tends to be one of the most neglected champions, skin wise. ( ninja edit, it would make sense if this was the Greek LoL launch skin, similar to our most recent Pantheon skin )

Dreadknight Tryndamere, as mentioned in a previous post, has several files floating around. I can only assume this is going be in the same vein as Dreadknight Nasus and Dreadknight Garen.

Similarly, Glacial Malphite and "Lubu" Jarvan, both of which have unmapped textures, are present.



Some pretty neat stuff, if you ask me. These shots are all sliced and diced from screen caps of the files, viewed Skin Installer Ultimate ( a simple way to browse .RAF files ).  If anyone can shed some light on these ( perhaps they are always hanging around or are from abandoned champions? ) or has anything to add, feel free to comment!

So, aside from queue times occasionally getting wonky, NA seems to have stabled out for the most part. A handful of players, by Riot's mistake, managed to lose some content - including runes, champions, ip, and rp. Riot is diligently working to restore these items and has decided to compensate all of those who lost something ( pretty much boning their game play while it was gone ) with 1000 RP!

We have granted players who lost inventory the 1000 RP. We will be following up with each of you via email as well within the next several hours. Spend it as you please.

- RiotJeongal, Global Network Ops Manager, via the official forums.

Riot has released a statement about the continuing problems plaguing the NA servers.

Summoners,

Lance, aka CaptSturm here. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m charged with maintaining the health of the League of Legends live service around the world. As you know, it’s been a rough week here in North America.

We are painfully aware of the problems many of you have been experiencing:

-Extended outages: The North American service has been unavailable for significant stretches of time
-Long queue times: We’ve had to throttle logins and concurrent players due to these issues
-We’ve also confirmed that some players are missing content: runes, rune pages, champions, etc.

This is frustrating for you, and we feel that frustration deeply. This isn’t the service you’ve come to expect and it isn’t what we want to deliver. It’s been code red for engineering and support Rioters, and we’ve been working literally around the clock to identify and resolve these problems.

Many of you have asked for more information on what’s causing these problems, and we understand that desire – I’m going to try my best to give you some insight into what we’re working on, but please understand that our first priority is to put out the fire rather than exhaustively document it.

-This patch is like an iceberg – what you see on the surface is small in comparison to the behind-the-scenes infrastructure changes it includes.
-The problems we’re experiencing are database-related – specifically, it’s a data throughput issue. Our infrastructure handles a massive volume of data and requests every day, and the backend changes in this patch introduced a new bottleneck.
-We put every patch through the wringer including load testing and PBE player testing, and this patch passed those tests. The problems didn’t crop up until we pushed it to live. This has exposed some load testing gaps that we’re going to address (simulating millions of concurrent players is truly challenging).
-Over the last 48 hours, we’ve made substantial hardware configuration changes that we believe will address the problems. We’re actively monitoring the service, but we’re still not out of the woods.

I know the thing you want to hear most is when everything’s going to be back to normal. I’d love to give you a timeframe, but we want to be absolutely confident in our solution before signaling the all-clear. Our number one priority is restoration of a stable game experience.

Thanks for your patience. I’m going to continue keeping you guys up-to-date as we work to fully restore League of Legends to the service you’ve come to expect.

Salute,
'Sturm

- CaptSturm, Sr. Producer, Live Service, via the official forums.

 RiotRara has taken to reddit and twitter to post an update on the issues with the NA servers. This update, in light of the servers AND website/forums having problems, says*:

Hey Summoners,

We are currently experiencing some issues with our North American servers and website. We are looking into it and will give you updates as they arrive. I'll link back to our forums once it's up and running, but for now I'll be updating you guys through here.

Update: Launcher status is set to Offline. Loss Forgiveness mode is enabled.

Update 2: Website is now online. See here for more info.

For context: Loss Forgiveness, or 'The Button', is a mode we can enable where losses and leaves are not counted, nor can you lose Elo. However, Elo gains are halved to offset Elo inflation. Unfortunately, this only applies to games that end after it has been enabled.

* this has been updated several times to corespond with the edits on the reddit post.

edit 1 ( ~ 5:00 pm PST ) : League site is back up. Well, it's up enough to inform us of the unscheduled maintenance.

edit 2 (~ 5:45 pm PST ): League site is back up and the thread on reddit has been updated, so I updated this post accordingly.

edit 3 ( 5:00 am PST ): Servers are back up and the login queues are nearly gone. Ranked Queues are still disabled though.

Seems like yesterday was full of bugs and server issues, with just a hint of Jayce rumors. Let's take a look at what went down on 6-20:

1) Patch Deployed

The last patch, which was originally deployed on 6-17 but then rolled back in light of all the server issues, was redeployed. The patch notes remain the same ( click here to check them out ), but there were still, apparently, several kinks to work out...

2) More problems!
Between a log in queue rocketing over tens of thousands or just going down , servers going down,  and a bajillion bugs ( teleport to abilities not working, xerath ult bug, baron buffed, and many more ), I think it's safe to say the 6-20 patch was as busted as the 6-17 patch. While it was never rolled back, it certainly caused many issues that are still persisting into 6-21.


3) Possible Jayce Abilities Leak?



While the constant server issues have proven to be quite distracting, we are still without a lot of official information about Jayce, the next champion. His animation files ( above ) and sound files have made it into the various PBE patches, but we haven't got anything from Riot's tight sealed lips, As a thread on reddit has discovered, the latest leak, from a Chinese LoL site, seems to have a rough draft of his abilities laid out:  Jayce appears to have an ability  that allows him to switch his weapon ( changing auto attacks and a few abilities ). He toggles from a hammer to an energy cannon of some sort.  You can check out the links for yourself, as it's all very messy and unconfirmed at this point; still looks very interesting though.

It seems both NA and EUW, both of whom ate crap following the last patch deploy, are going to be compensated by all of the nasty downtime and server issues that have been plaguing LoL over the past few days. A 10 win IP Boost will be awarded to EUW /NA summoners who have played a game in the past ten days.

Summoners!

My name is Lance Stites and I’m a Senior Producer at Riot Games. I’ve introduced myself previously, but my primary responsibility is to maintain the health of our global live service and ensure the quality level of everyone’s League of Legends experience is as high as possible. 

As too many of you are aware, we had a significant outage during Sunday, June 17. We have been working throughout the previous week for a patch that we felt important enough to come in over the weekend and deploy. Part of it was improved stability and security updates, part content preparation, and variety of other improvements. We felt we could get this update out “off peak” in the middle of the night and be back to service quickly. Obviously, it didn’t happen that way. We had significant issues that resulted in a pretty hardcore, full on restore. We rallied, well, everyone—from the President and CEO on down. 

We know these interruptions are the worst and we’re sorry for the inconvenience it caused.

As a thanks for your continued patience we’re going to send you a 10-win IP boost. These Boosts can take up to a couple or even few days to make it out to everyone, so sit tight! Please note: only summoners that have played a game on NA in the last 10 days will qualify for this.

Thank you again for your patience, and thank you for playing League of Legends.

TL;DR: Patch went haywire, too much downtime; have a 10-win boost!

- CaptStrum, Sr. Producer, Live Service, via the official forums.