Hi all, Brian "Penrif" Bossé here with a fresh batch of gory, nerdy details surrounding an outage for League. Today we'll be going through why the EU West shard was out to lunch for just over five hours on January 22, 2021. We don't always write these things up - they take time to do and the reasons for outages aren't always that interesting - but this one was particularly painful as it was quite long and on the heels of some other, unrelated outages so figured it'd be worth a dive.

The Riot internship program exists to help players drive their professional and personal development. This is the second post in the 2020 intern series - be sure to check out the first post as well.

The Riot internship program helps technical players drive their professional growth by embedding them on tech teams and having them contribute to impactful, exciting technology projects. Last year we published an article by some of our interns, giving readers a glimpse at the projects technical interns get to work on. We’re doing a follow-up this year, but with additional sections to reflect our new games. 

There were so many interns excited to contribute to this article that this year we’ll be doing a 2-part series. Intern stories are sorted into categories - the first post (this one) includes all blurbs for League of Legends, TFT, & VALORANT, and the second post focuses on General Game Tech & Tooling/Infrastructure.

Welcome back to the Running Online Services series! This long-running series explores and documents how Riot Games develops, deploys, and operates its backend infrastructure. Since 24 months is an eternity in this space, we figured we would update you all on how things have worked out, new challenges we faced, and what we learned addressing them!

Our technical interns worked with fellow Rioter technologists on everything from game engineering to developer tooling. Before they left, we asked some of them to share projects they contributed to, and to tell their stories of interning at Riot. 

A whole new game means a whole heap o’ new technology. While we won’t be able to cover all of it in one go, I’d love to give you a glimpse at how we add features to LoR. I’ll describe our process of making it work so we can playtest it, move on to making it presentable using our suite of artist tools, tweaking it for balance, and finally making it shine by adding motion and sound before sending it out to players.

Hiya folks, Brian "Penrif" Bossé, your local friendly Tech Lead of League here. I'm taking some time in between matches of TFT to wax philosophic about game engines and how we on League make decisions around what direction to take our custom game engine. Join me on a moderately long look at one dimension of game engine design, where League currently exists on that dimension, and where we're taking the game from there.

Imagine you're a web developer. You have to create an app that leverages five different data sources. The project has 26 different views built in - and don’t forget to make it fast, easy to test, and reliable. I work on creating the tools that make this kind of app as easy as possible for developers to build and manage. My name is Matthew Drake and I’m a member of the Riot Data team.

Hey folks! We’re going to take a trip back in time. The year is now 20xx, and we’ve decided that it’s finally time to send one of League of Legends’ most long standing, revered or reviled features (depending on who you ask) to the meme graveyard.

That’s right - it’s time to retire runes and masteries.

Hey there! I’m Tyler "Riot Adabard" Turk, Senior Infrastructure Engineer, and I work on the Player Accounts team at Riot. The Player Accounts team is responsible for every player's ability to log in and manage account data, and we recently re-architected our system to become GDPR compliant, provide a better player experience, and enable Riot to become a multi-product company in the future.