Riot is rebuilding Clash in hopes of finally launching the in-game tournament mode

Clash hasn’t exactly had a smooth road to release. After it missed its planned launch last year, thanks to some technical difficulties, the mode has been in and out of testing ever since. The last big update Riot had on the mode was that another round of tests was starting a few months ago, but those didn’t work out either. Now, in a new announcement, Riot has opened up about some of the problems tests have faced and what the future of the mode will look like.

According to Riot’s post, the issues that cropped up in Clash’s last test are the same as the ones the mode has always had. By trying to start too many games at the same time, as part of the tournament format, Clash is putting too heavy a load on League of Legends’ servers.

To fix this, Riot is going to fundamentally change the mode’s format and the way it attempts to put together tournaments. The first change that comes as a part of this new solution is that teams will be able to log in within a much larger window and games will begin immediately. This means that instead of being put in a bracket before the tournament starts, the system will automatically sort teams into brackets when they log in and place them with other teams that are ready. This way matches can start immediately instead of all being centered around one scheduled time.

Another piece of this change is that brackets will be more flexible. That way if one team, or certain players don’t show up, teams can be moved to brackets more easily. The weekend schedule for each Clash event is also going to change to help with stability. In the past the idea was to have one tournament running across the entire weekend. Riot’s new plan, however, is to have separate tournaments that run on Saturday and Sunday.

While the goal of these plans is to increase the overall stability of Clash, these new ideas haven’t been implemented or tested quite yet. As part of Riot’s post, the developer included information on what the schedule for these improvements might actually look like. For now, the only concrete times that Riot has planned are a few regional tests later this summer, but there’s no date set for global testing or the official launch.