The LoL Patches thread

Update on Dropped Games, aka "drophack"

Hi Summoners,

My name is Bellissimoh and I’m a Producer at Riot Games. My primary responsibility is to maintain the health of our global live service and ensure the quality of everyone’s League of Legends experience is as high as possible.

As some of you have recently experienced, a handful of players have been attacking our live service to kill games that are in-progress. They’re doing this through a form of Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS) and not a hack.

As of yesterday’s hotfix, we’ve put some changes in place that prevent games from dying. Players in a targeted game will still experience lag and possibly be disconnected, but the client should now be able to reconnect to the game automatically and resume where it left off. To spell this out a little, if your client suddenly lags and presents you with a “Connecting screen” you should allow it to try its magic and reconnect you to the game. When it is successful this will allow you to rejoin the battle much quicker without reloading the client.

We have taken steps to identify these attackers and remove them from our service permanently. Additionally we are pursuing legal avenues and working with the proper authorities.

We’re doing everything we can to implement short- and long-term solutions to fight these types of activities. When someone’s intentionally ruining the experience of other players, we take it very seriously.

I’ll be watching this thread for the next hour or so to answer questions along with Akov, one of Riot's Network Engineers.

At the end of the day, our goal is to maintain a reliable and fair League of Legends service for everyone.

Also, for those that wondered why Riot took so long to fix the drophack problem, it also involves understanding the nature of DDoS attacks...

Just to expand upon this further. DDoS events like this are very cat and mouse. Many of the initial events were quickly dealt with and we prevented futher events with out many people even knowing. But the attackers adapted, and then so did we, back and forth until one of us does something big enough to make the other person have to go back to the drawing board. Thats sorta what happened here...

It was also revealed that there was the possibility that a "drophacked" match could have impacted a "neighboring" match that was going on at the same time.

Otherwise, I'm very glad Riot took a lot of effort and time to tackle this.