One of the downsides of being the most popular game in the world, especially one like League of Legends where big money is starting to enter the equation, is that hacking and cheats become a constant threat. At least that's what developer Riot is blaming on a recent spate of outages, downtime and login queues.
According to an address to the community, Riot has dealt with more Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks in the past two months, than it has in the previous four years. They've grown exponentially in size too, to the point where when some of them are launched, they don't even reach Riot's servers, they take down their ISP.
This makes it very hard for Riot to implement any sort of fix as the problem is no longer theirs, but everyone's. Players then get severe lag or are disconnected and then you have tens of thousands of people trying to log back in, further stressing login servers and creating nasty queue wait times.
There is light at the end of the tunnel though: "We expect the current attacks to get better soon," said Riot's VP of network operations, sonicdeathmonk. "We already have been able to fend off many problems before they create problems for you. Our network team has been working almost non-stop for several weeks both fighting off DDoS attacks around the world and strengthening our Internet services. We have also been working with telecoms and ISPs to help them understand how to block these attacks so that their services are not affected. Some fixes have required new equipment and ISP circuits to be ordered which can take weeks to get shipped and installed. Some telecoms and ISPs are slower than others in applying the fixes needed to ensure they do not fall over from these attacks, we depend on many ISPs so its important that all ISPs make the fix or the bad traffic finds a way to knock off our servers. "
However, Riot acknowledges that there will be no single solution to fix this issue. It's an "arms race," where as soon as one fix is put in place, another hole will be made by the hackers, but all Riot can do is keep fighting the good fight, so you can fight yours in the Summoner's Rift.
