League of Legends Worlds 2022 is currently in progress, with the best teams from around the world gathering in North America to compete for the Ultimate title. The group stage is underway, with teams competing in a double round-robin for the chance to compete in best-of-five knockouts.
However, as with any major event, not everything goes as planned. Riot requires a tool to keep things fair for the competing teams when issues and bugs arise. This is where Chronobreak comes into play.
What is Chronobreak?
The term ‘Chronobreak’ keeps popping up during competitive game pauses in League of Legends Esports. Simply put, Chronobreak is Riot Games’ method of preventing professional matches from being lost due to game-breaking bugs or player issues.
Chronobreak is named after Ekko’s Ultimate, in which he returns to a place he was in exactly 4 seconds before. While the time in the game tool is more flexible, the concept is pretty similar.
At Worlds 2022, when Gumayusi’s mouse disconnected during a Fnatic vs T1 match, the game was rolled back 10 seconds. The game cannot continue as is because issues like this would give an unfair advantage.
Riot first revealed this technology it had been working on during a game between Cloud9 and FlyQuest in the NA League of Legends Championship Series (NA LCS) Spring Split in 2017. Riot decided to use the “Deterministic Disaster Recovery Tool,” or what is now known as the Chronobreak, after a bug with Miss Fortune’s ultimate.
This tool is crucial to the competitive truthfulness of Lol Esports, whether it’s due to a visual bug, sound or external issue, or something else. Rewinding the game with Chronobreak is a simple yet brilliant tool for allowing games to thrive in the face of inevitable problems.