Riot Games just unintentionally reversed everything of Patch 13.1B for League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics; here’s what happened
League of Legends players began to observe strange occurrences in their games on February 6. Patch 13.1B was released as a partial substitute for patch 13.2, which had been delayed owing to hackers obtaining Riot Games’ source code. The B-patch was intended to partly launch some of the major improvements planned for 13.2 in order to keep the metagame from becoming stale.
However, about halfway through February 6, the entirety update 13.1B vanished from Riot Games’ live servers, reverting the game to the previous patch.
Why did Riot roll back Patch 13.1b?
On February 6, players playing on the live League of Legends servers first noticed the changes. All of the previous patch’s balancing modifications and other tweaks were gone.
It wasn’t a partial return to previous systems or a series of planned changes. The whole patch simply vanished from the servers, leaving everyone left with an outdated version. Vandiril, a content producer and bug-finder extraordinaire, identified the issue in a YouTube video.
Riot Games acknowledged the incident on Twitter, stating that a fault forced the patch to roll back on itself, returning to Patch 13.1 instead. The developer expressed confidence that a solution would be discovered and service would be restored within a few hours. The patch has been repaired and re-applied to the live servers two hours after the notification was made on Twitter.
There is no official reason for why the last-minute fix was reverted back as of yet. As a result, there’s no way of knowing what technological flaw caused an entire patch to vanish. The theft of Riot Games’ source code via a social engineering assault changed the patch cycle significantly and made deploying new content more difficult.
Riot Games should have found out how to fix these flaws so that Patch 13.3 doesn’t have the same problems. Patch 13.3 is available two days after the issue first appeared on February 8, 2023.
There will most certainly be no formal explanation for why a patch was removed from live servers, but it appears that Riot Games’ patch schedule has been reinstated.