The launch of Teamfight Tactics hasn’t actually been all that horrible. It first went live on the League of Legends public beta environment (PBE) with queues well over half an hour long. When it was finally added to the live game client, queue times were sometimes equally as long. Today, Ed Altorfer, Senior UX Design Manager, took some time to talk about the long queue times in Teamfight Tactics.
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Long Off-Peak Queue Times in Teamfight Tactics
Though server issues are expected when a game in beta goes live, TFT experienced a weird issue where servers actually got worse after the opening wave of players finally got through. According to Riot, there were some configuration issues that caused this, but it been resolved since Thursday.
Shortly after we went live in North America, it looked like our servers were overloaded even though we were below capacity. We were also seeing some unusual errors in North America and a few other regions that we hadn’t seen in OCE and JP. We started looking at configuration differences between our servers and found all the regions with the errors had a slightly different configuration and we used that info to identify the problem.
Status: A fix was implemented around 1:00 am Pacific Time (UTC -7) Thursday and the server looks healthy. We will continue to monitor over the next few days to make sure North America stays stable.
Long Teamfight Tactics Queue Times in Western Europe
The EU West server had much longer queue times than the rest of the world. Riot says the game proved extremely popular in the region which required them to temporarily disable the queue. The fix is now live, however.
The configuration bug from North America thankfully didn’t affect EUW, but as we approached peak hours throughout Europe we saw instability and long queue times as a result of tons of players queueing up for games. We implemented queue time delays, but still saw issues crop up with the services that power parties and matchmaking. We temporarily disabled the queue while we investigated those issues.
Status: It took a couple tries but we identified a fix which is now live and EUW is looking relatively stable. We will be continuing to monitor the region for other issues throughout the weekend.
Why Teamfight Tactics Was Delayed in Other Regions
Because of all of the above issues, Riot decided to delay the Teamfight Tactics launch in other regions. However, those problems are now resolved and the developer will be deploying the game elsewhere.
We expected the issues we saw in EUW to affect other large regions, so we temporarily delayed TFT’s launch in a few places to give us time to find a solution. Now that we have fixes in place, our plan is to finish deploying Teamfight Tactics to all our remaining regions within the next few hours.
Having said that, if we encounter any issues in those regions, we may need to take actions to preserve server stability, up to and including temporarily disabling TFT.
Going forward, Altorfer says they’re “cautiously optimistic” that longer queue times are a thing of the past.
If you want more Teamfight Tactics information, we certainly have it. Head on over to our TFT hub!
