League of Legends news » Listening to Clash feedback from EU players

EU summoners,

After the cancellation of Europe’s Clash tournament this past Friday evening due to technical issues, we heard loud and clear how frustrated local players were by the last-minute timing of the announcement. You arranged your weekend plans around the tournament and felt ambushed by the news, annoyed that we didn’t give you more advance warning that Clash might not go ahead.

We are always working to improve and this was a fair criticism. After all, it’s true that our EU Publishing team had been following internal updates about technical challenges in other regions prior to announcing our own region’s cancellation.

In the spirit of transparency we want to be open with you about our reasoning and take responsibility for ways in which we could have done better.

So what happened?

When we first started noticing issues with Clash during Oceania’s launch on Friday, several hours ahead of our own region’s launch, the EU team began to actively monitor the situation, joining internal chat threads in which Riot engineers around the globe were working feverishly to narrow down the root cause. Unfortunately, no “smoking gun” could be readily identified.

We inquired whether Clash would be stabilised in time for EU’s lock-in. There was still cautious optimism from those working on the technical issues that Clash might be fixed in time to go ahead in EU, and we were hopeful that the technical issues flagged in earlier-launching regions would be resolved in time for us to go ahead as planned.

As you’re aware, this did not work out, and we ultimately made the call to postpone Clash on Friday evening, not long before the event was due to start. We did not want to put out information saying that Clash was cancelled, only to have our teams say that the issue had been fixed in time for us to proceed. The EU team did not want players to see incorrect information and exit League, only to later find out that they could have played in the tournaments, missing out on rewards and potential progression.

We’re taking this as a learning experience, going forward. This is why, after initially mentioning a potential Saturday start, we decided to proactively cancel the full weekend instead of leaving you waiting for another update with a very real risk of a second postponement, which would have been even more painful for everyone involved.

We respect your personal time – we know you’re all busy and really appreciate you taking time out of your lives to play League. In the future we’ll be making difficult calls earlier, and ensuring that EU players are given all the correct information as quickly as possible. Even if that’s just a forewarning that a given launch window is at risk.

If you missed the information about what we’re doing for affected players, you can find that in the article “What’s next for Clash?”.

If you have any questions or just want to reach out to us, you can do so in the comments below, or on the @loleu Twitter page.