How does Riot want to make sure the next Clashes will take place without problems?
Clash is another way to compete in League of Legends that provides players with something more than a ranking queue. Fans of the game in full teams join a tournament in which they can compete for prizes against teams of a similar level.
In practice, however, Clash doesn’t always work as one would expect – recent tournaments have had significant problems, resulting in players who wanted to take part in the fun not being able to join and being forced to wait for up to several hours (Riot addresses problems with Clash in League of Legends. What went wrong?). Riot wrote why it was unable to communicate with players. Now a lengthy statement from one of the developers has emerged.
Riot on Clash
The developers admit that participation in the Clash usually takes a really committed part of the community. Riot Sakaar writes that the studio realizes that due to the fact that the Clash only takes place on a scheduled date, the problems with it are even more painful for the players who dedicate their weekend to it.
Recently, there have been quite a few problems that the team had to face. Despite their efforts, the tournament could not take place.
Each of the Clash issues over the past 2 months has had a distinct root cause. We want to ensure clash quality ASAP and instead of taking a lot of time to address them all, we’ll be applying some short-term solutions to bolster quality while we figure out what a longer-term solution could be.
Riot has announced that it plans to implement more extensive quality testing that will focus exclusively on the Clash tournament and provide more time for the developers who are working on it. In addition, any changes to the code that may affect the tournament will be examined more closely.
We believe these actions will allow us to run the upcoming MSI clash tournaments on May 6th and 7th reliably (unless something happens entirely outside of our control, e.g. a power outage at our datacenter). These short-term solutions for the MSI clash tournaments are in all honesty not a sustainable solution for us, so in parallel we are investigating improvements to automated testing and other changes to high-volatility parts of Clash to make it more resilient in the future.
Riot will therefore try to ensure that the next Clash tournaments will take place without problems. It was also announced that, as compensation, players will receive tickets that they had to buy to join tournaments with problems. This news did not satisfy fans who wasted a lot of time in the tournament lobby.
There have actually been quite a few comments saying that Riot should make more of an effort and somehow compensate players for the wasted time and that the return of tickets is something so obvious that it should not be subject to any discussion.
Refunding something that is trivial and costs very little should have been done without even making this post. Instead this is a whole lot of nothing that doesn’t actually assist players impacted in a meaningful way. You managed to address that players take time off of their schedules to coordinate to play a competitive game mode and then after wasting hours of their time and the mode that won’t be back for like a month all you do is refund them their couple of bucks or blue essence? Cool. Pat yourselves on the back for a job well done.
Perhaps the developers will still respond to fan statements, although at this point it doesn’t look good.