If you’re one of the millions who play League of Legeneds and Valorant, don’t expect any game patches soon (or at least, this week). Riot Games, the developer of both games says its development ecosystem was hacked. Due to this, they won’t push any patches live for fear of compromising the entire live environment.
Riot Gamers said on social media it intends to keep everyone up to date on the situation and let them know when the situation is resolved.
Earlier this week, systems in our development environment were compromised via a social engineering attack. We don’t have all the answers right now, but we wanted to communicate early and let you know there is no indication that player data or personal information was obtained.
— Riot Games (@riotgames) January 20, 2023
Riot Games asked fans to exercise patience as they work through the unauthorized entry. Clearly, Riot Games isn’t entirely sure of all details, so they’re waiting as their internal investigation reveals more.
This means Riot Games can’t push any new content live, patches or otherwise. This also affects more longterm patches expected by fans in coming months.
“This may impact our delivery date for Patch 13.2. The League team is working to stretch the limits of what we can hotfix in order to deliver the majority of the planned and tested balance changes on time still,” the LoL team stated in the same thread.
“Other things like the Ahri ASU might have to move to patch 13.3 (Feb. 8), but we’ll keep you updated as we work through this.”
“This issue may impact our ability to release the full scope of balance changes planned, but we’re working to implement the most meaningful of those possible through a hotfix at our scheduled patch time,” they concluded.
The good news is, according to the director of League Studio, Andrei van Roon, the 13.2 patch is still coming and won’t be stopped by the hack. So that’s ultimately good news for fans of the game.
Because gaming networks store an assortment of user data, its of the utmost importance that gaming studios take major precautions when pushing files live. Riot Games is doing the right thing, though, its going to be a point of frustration for a lot of gamers, at least for the coming weeks, maybe months.