Gaming Service Interruption Analysis

League of Legends servers recover after service interruption during TFT release

Riot Games, the developer of one of the most popular free video games around the world, League of Legends, has recently launched a new game mode, Teamfight Tactics (TFT), which has had a great success, especially among League of Legends players. 

Despite the expectation and the impact of the video game on the Internet, their creators, trying to avoid servers collapse in order to offer a good gaming experience, launched it gradually during the first week of July in different regions worldwide. Furthermore, they warned users that the gaming experience might not be as great as it should due to the servers overload during the launch. 

However, although Riot Games tried to reduce the possible servers' collapse, in the United States the service finally suffered an interruption during TFT launch (on the 1st July, 2019) due to the huge number of players who were attracted by this new game mode. As a consequence, many players had to wait even more than an hour to start a game. The incident was quickly solved, and the next morning the servers recovered their usual connectivity. 

The following graphs show the interruption that League of Legends USA servers suffered (which are the same servers used for TFT). The information has been obtained from MedUX devices deployed worldwide. 

 Until TFT release day, the data gathered by MedUX showed that the number of succesful completed tests against the video game servers was greater than 95%. As it can be seen in the graph below, the 1st July the servers suffered the interruption mentioned above, however, during the 2nd July morning, players have already recovered the connectivity and were able to access the game normally. 

During release day in the USA, the results of the tests performed against League of Legends servers showed a 25% increase in the percentage of packets lost during the connection. The packet loss involves that the servers do not answer, so the connection to the game services is lost. In addition, the video game can suffer stalls that may affect the quality of experience. On the other hand, Europe's League of Legends servers, where TFT wasn't released yet, answered normally during that day. 

MedUX has also detected that the loss of more than 20% of packets persisted until the 2nd July morning, even though the connection to the servers had already been recovered. 

The User Experience and the customer satisfaction may be affected by this kind of incidents which, sometimes, can be unforeseen. Regarding this inconvenience and considering users' complaints, TFT creators took suitable measures: they decided to deactivate the game for the users, just for one hour, and release it again later, in order to check the correct operation of the improvements made to stabilize the servers. During this relaunch, and despite of the huge number of players playing the game, the problems did not come back and the users could access the platform and enjoy a good experience. 

MedUX monitors the most-used services by the general public from the end-user perspective, and detects this kind of incidents, which allows operators and service providers to foresee complaints, improve the Quality of the Service and increase their customers' satisfaction. 

Find out more about online gaming Quality of Experience in our blog. If you want to know more about MedUX service interruption analysis, contact us at hello@medux.com.

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