[ Updated ] A note about recent EUW server downtime & compensation

"Hello community, 

Recently, EUW experienced a pretty rough patch of degraded service and downtime, starting around May 18th and continuing off and on until recently. We've identified and mitigated the root cause of the issues, so wanted to take a moment to reflect on the situation a bit and talk about compensation! 

As League players ourselves, we're keenly aware of how much it sucks when you can't log in and play. We know how it feels to get booted out of a game, or to lose a ranked game because the servers took a dive. It's intensely frustrating and frankly unacceptable. 

The overwhelming growth of the League of Legends community has constantly surprised and humbled us. EUW in particular has been an extremely fast-growing platform, hitting new record peaks on a regular basis. As a result, we're kind of in uncharted territory when it comes to scaling an online game service. Occasionally this means things have broken in unexpected ways. Members of our technology team in Europe and back in Los Angeles have been hard at work to scale the infrastructure behind League of Legends and provide a game experience that meets your expectations. 

We also know that communication to players on EUW hasn't been optimal, and that's been a problem for a long time. We're working on a comprehensive plan to improve this for European players (speaking of which, we've got 20 open positions for the community team in Dublin - come help us make the experience better for European players!). As a first step, we'll be holding an AMA on Wednesday with technology leadership at Riot to explain in more detail some of the problems we've found and solved. We will also talk about what goes into running the League of Legends service in Europe. Join us in General Discussion this Wednesday June 5 at 6pm GMT+1 with senior technical Rioters based in Dublin and LA. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the EUW server, come along and join in the conversation right here in General Discussion. 

Finally, on the subject of compensation: we'll be giving a 20-win IP boost to all players who encountered issues on EUW between May 18th and May 30th. We hope you accept this as a gesture of apology for not only the most recent server issues, but also for the subpar experience players on EUW have had in recent months. 

We want to thank you all for your understanding and for bearing with us as we battled those pesky yordles in our systems."

"Totally understand where you guys are coming from. 

This isn’t necessarily going to change how many of you justifiably feel, but I would like to address some misconceptions I’m seeing pop up, just so we’re all on the same page here. 

- NA hasn’t received compensation since the last 4-win boost that EUW also received. 

- NA has never received 1000 RP for downtime (less than 1% of NA players received this for a week’s worth of lost content). I know it's hard to go against such a long-standing meme but "1000 RP for NA" is somewhat untrue. 

- Korea didn’t get 1000 RP, ever. 

- Korea’s service issues weren’t minor – they’ve experienced major service disruption and downtime since February of this year. Their most recent episode of downtime was exceptionally bad. To be clear, this was not the same problem experienced on EUW.
The real issue here is truly Silent Night Sona. The decision to give that skin to Korean players was made by our Korean team, and to be honest it was well beyond any compensation Riot’s done previously. The team there didn’t consider how it might be viewed by other League of Legends players around the world, and it was probably a mistake.

There’s another rub: virtually no one in Korea has Silent Night Sona (about 170 people were old school NA players that transferred). In Europe, WAY more people own some of the older, rarer limited edition skins, and giving something like that away would cause even more player pain. That certainly doesn’t make this feel any better, but hopefully you can understand why it’s challenging and we’re kinda between a rock and a hard place."