League of Legends Loot Issue Solved on PBE Servers

An issue that was affecting the loot system on League of Legends' PBE servers has now been fixed before the problem had the opportunity to affect the live servers.

PBE players that have been active on the game's testing grounds may have noticed a lack of loot over the past week. It turns out that the entire loot system was actually turned off so that the loot tech team could take care of a bug that was impacting various loot transactions.

"We managed to find a unique and arcane bug that we couldn't repro in our internal environments," said Riot Rainbow Pi, the loot tech lead. "It caused a ~50% failure rate of any transaction in loot. (Crafting, add loot via missions or store, etc). We decided it would be safest to disable access to players while we triaged the issue."

The issue that was causing the failure of loot transactions apparently stemmed from an updated version of the loot system that was created in preparation for the Lunar Revel content. Riot Rainbow Pi said that despite not seeing any issues with the new loot version during internal testing, the issues that caused loot transactions to fail began appearing on the PBE servers. Crafting and missions were two areas that were negatively impacted and led to an overall negative experience, but even attempts to rewind the loot system back to the previous didn't yield results.

"We decided to spend some time triaging it, we had found a root cause error but we weren't able to find a quick fix," Riot Rainbow Pi continued. "We tried to roll it back to the previous working version so we could get loot back up and running, but for some reason the previous version was no longer behaving. In an attempt to minimize player pain, we made a decision to disable loot while we looked into this. Over this past week, we have been researching, experimenting, and trying to get loot back up. Half of our team, plus a number of people outside of the loot team were working on this. It wasn't until today that one of our experiments proved successful."

The Rioter also pointed out that the way this issue eluded internal tests meant that it could've affected the live servers as well if it had gone through, a problem that undoubtedly would've spawned tons of loot issues and compensation requests for lost loot. The bug has been resolved now though, so the Lunar Revel content should be able to go live later on without any loot-related issues.