tl;dr: Clash is delayed and needs some bigger adjustments to get ready for primetime. Clash will be back in a series of free regional tests before the end of the year.

First of all, to everyone that had a negative experience with the launch of Clash, we apologize. As players, we were so excited to experience Clash alongside all of you, and, as developers, we’re incredibly disappointed that your first experience with Clash may have been a bad one. The team has been working extremely hard to figure out what went wrong and what we need to do to re-launch Clash.

In this post, we’ll talk about what happened with the launch, where we’re at now, and what the future looks like.

WHAT HAPPENED

Shortly after launch weekend failed, we outlined our plan to launch one-day tests in each region to test our quick fixes. While Clash ran smoothly in EUNE, Oceania, Korea, Russia, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines, we still encountered a variety of problems in Vietnam, Turkey, and EU West.

At their core, many of these issues stem from the fact that the platform that powers League of Legends was created quickly, responding to rapid scale around the globe. Technically, the platform was written as a monolithic service, which means that when things go wrong, it’s difficult to debug. This monolithic platform handles things like: starting games, telling your client what skins and champions you own, what level you are, etc. Over time, we’ve been refactoring aspects of the platform opportunistically, but this is a long-term process that is akin to rebuilding parts of the airplane mid-flight.

Clash behaves in a unique way, insofar as it’s the only experience in League that asks the platform to create a huge number of games simultaneously. After the success of the various public betas we ran leading up to launch, we felt confident that the experience would stand up. But ultimately this unique aspect of Clash together with the nature of our platform led to the failures many of you experienced.

We are now in the process of addressing these issues—both for the short-term and the long-run. In the short-term, we’ll be staggering game starts during Clash by making the scouting phase variable (meaning some participants may experience slightly longer scouting phases), as well as changing the way parts of Clash work to be less taxing on the platform. In the long-run, we’ll accelerate breaking out the aspects of the platform that are critical to game starts, making it easier to debug and fix and also fail gracefully.

While we do this work, we’ll be pausing all regional tests until we’re confident the next time you play we can provide the experience you deserve.

WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN

We’re currently working out exact timings, but we wanted to share the basic flow for how we’re approaching a relaunch: