Riot Games is nothing more than a small indie company, right? During the early hours of February 7, 2023, the company removed every single change they implemented with LoL Patch 13.1b. Not a single LoL-player saw this coming, eh? Was this still part of the cyberattack from a few weeks ago, or did Riot just royally f*ck up?
Honestly, what is happening at Riot HQ these days? A cyberattack, an awful start to the season and now an entire patch was just removed. Those of you who were trying to get in a few more ranked games must have noticed how every single change from LoL Patch 13.1b just reverted.
Well, thankfully, Riot has fixed the problem, but those of you who wanted to play some ranked were unable, due to Riot disabling ranked to combat the patch issues they were having. Let's just hope things go a bit smoother once Patch 13.3 goes live, eh?
League of Legends: Riot Deletes Patch "Due to a Bug"
The well-known bug-hunter Vandiril was the first to notice that something was amiss. Late in the evening in Europe, so early evening for all you North Americans, players noticed that items and champions had different stats... stats that looked an awful lot like the ones from the original LoL Patch 13.1.
Vandiril looked through all the changes and made the deduction that Riot had legit deleted their hotfix changes and reverted the state of the game to before then. At the time of posting his videos Riot had not made any official announcement of the patch issues yet either, so he had to come to the conclusion himself, that Riot deleted an entire patch.
Riot literally just completely removed their last patch LOL. Entire 13.1b patch is gone. I can't... pic.twitter.com/HPawBWLGGI
— Vandiril (@Vandiril) February 6, 2023
It took Riot an hour to make a statement regarding the current build of the live servers. According to them Patch 13.31b was reverted "due to a bug" and that they're aware of the problem and working on a solution. In the meantime they'd also disabled ranked queues.
Insane, right? League of Legends basically moved back in time for a few hours, with every single post-hotfix change being wiped from the face of this earth... almost like it had been a two-week fever dream. Thankfully, the devs worked quickly to fix the issue and within a few hours the problem was solved, which meant players could also go back to playing ranked again.
Why Did Riot Take An Entire Patch Offline?
Of course, many fans and players asked themselves the same thing. Why did Riot have to remove an entire patch? Was it because of the recent cyberattacks that have hit Riot where source code for LoL and TFT were stolen?
Riot has had their hands full trying to get their systems back online after the attack, which is why we didn't get an actual LoL Patch 13.2, instead the b-patch 13.1b. Some things like the Ahri ASU also had to be put on the back burner since it couldn't be ported to live servers off the PBE.
So, what does this have to do with the hotfix patch getting completely reverted on live servers? Well, because of the most recent patch being this hotfix patch, when Riot wanted to submit a new built, which accidentally overrode all the previous changes of LoL Patch 13.1b.
The how it happened is basically because 13.1b was a hotfix and submitting a new build overrode the changes.
— Spideraxe (@Spideraxe30) February 6, 2023
Basically... hotfix overrode hotfix. While Patch 13.1b brought a ton of changes to the game, it wasn't a complete patch like we're used to and when Riot tried to make some adjustments it just overrode everything. Had it been LoL Patch 13.2, as planned, then this probably wouldn't have happened.
So it seems like Riot continues to be affected by the cyberattack, but with Patch 13.3 coming out tomorrow we're going to slowly, and finally, get back to our regular scheduled program, bringing in some normalcy to our lives after a turbulent first month of LoL Season 13.