Shortly after the release of patch 9.20 to “League of Legends” servers worldwide last week, players began to experience technical issues causing the “play” button to be grayed out. This unexpected server crash affected players from all regions, causing them to be kicked from their games and unable to log back in. These games are currently counted as defeats, although it remains unclear whether Riot Games intends to nullify matches that occurred during the crash.

Players reaching out to solve the issues were met with replies telling them the problem was their fault, that they had a VPN enabled that blocked their connection or that their connection was faulty. During the five-hour downtime, Riot Support released no information to players other than they were “investigating and working to get this resolved.” Even now, players are kept in the dark about the cause of the crash.

Local “League of Legends” enthusiast Derrik Wilbourne (12) spoke about his experience with the crash.

“The servers crashed last night when I was in the middle of a game, and I couldn’t reconnect,” he said. “Even after that I couldn’t even hit play to try and queue for any more games, and for some reason, those games are even marked as losses, even though everyone [disconnected].”

Many players weren’t so lucky, losing ranked games that dropped their scores due to being kicked from the game or dropping down in rank from rank decay over time. Because most players are on at night, it is no surprise that many who had intended to queue up were met not only with error messages, but next day informed that they had been demoted due to Rank Decay, a system that penalizes a player for going too long without playing a ranked match.

Riot Games currently is facing massive community backlash for its handling of the situation because even though mistakes do happen, the servers were down for an extended period of time with no players being compensated for lost time and no official reason for the crash given. The main complaint from players is that this happened despite Riot Games being a multi-billion dollar company and the creator of the most popular online game in the world at the moment: “League of Legends.” With this much capital, Riot is no indie game development company, and players expect better service than this.

By Gabriel Carro