Here’s why Riot cancelled the opening weekend of Clash

Last weekend was supposed to be the official, global launch of Riot’s brand new competitive League of Legends mode called Clash. Instead, fans were slowly greeted with news of the mode’s delay in each individual region and, eventually, its full cancellation. While the game’s fans were certainly disappointed, it seems no one was as disappointed as Riot who released an explanation and apology to League fans shortly after the event was cancelled.

In the post — called, What’s next for Clash? — Riot started out with an explanation of the error that caused Clash to be shutdown for the weekend.

“As soon as the first tournaments for Clash were starting in the Philippines and Oceania, we realised games were not starting and teams were automatically losing, something that we had not seen in this fashion or scale in internal testing or regional betas across Vietnam, Turkey, both European servers, North America, and Korea,” the company said.

Initially, Riot had hoped to find a fix for this issue in time to save the remainder of the weekend and only lose the first day. However, after calling in engineers from different parts of the company, it became clear that the wasn’t going to be a fix in time for the mode to still be released during the weekend.

Riot then went on to apologize to players and detail how it would make things right. “First, we’ll be returning all used tickets to your account if they were spent. Further, as a thank you for your patience, we’d like to offer a bonus for everyone who was on a pending or active roster of 2 players or more. We’ll be granting a Clash Orb containing a 3 win XP boost, two Clash team logos, one for MSI and the second at random, and a shard for a 750 RP skin,” the company said. According to the post, all of these things will be added to the Loot tab of eligible players by June 3. Riot also briefly released the fan-favorite ARURF game mode to help tide fans over.

Finally, Riot announced that the official release of Clash is going to be put on hold until the company can be more confident in a bug-free launch. This means that Clash is going to undergo another round of testing, this time one-day betas in every single region. More information will be released on these betas and the full release of Clash will be released soon.