League is predominantly a team-based game.
However, for many players, the really highest level that you can compete in it
is either by queuing by yourself or queuing with one other person.
So Clash was supposed to be a tournament or team play mode for League.
There was a scheduled time
and you would get together with your friends and
play League of Legends as a group of five.
But, on day of launch, Clash didn't launch as planned.
As we were designing Clash, we did quite a lot of different tests across the world
in order to make sure that, A, it was working
and B, that players found it fun.
By the time the actual global launch was happening, we were pretty confident
and from what we could tell from testing, things looked to be running pretty smoothly.
So, Clash was a rolling release
and what that means is, every single country's tournament started at different times.
We wanted to make sure that there was enough time in between
that we could react to any issues by the time the next tournament starts.
And we started the first Clash tournament in the Philippines.
We all decided to get together and everybody was kind of huddled around
just a couple of computers.
One of them is one of the engineering computers watching the graphs.
The other one was a big screen that also had some streams on it.
And we see one streamer get into champion select
and we're like, "Okay, this feels pretty good."
And we see another streamer get into champion select
and now we're starting to getting excited.
And then you get to the end of champion select
when you would transition to the loading screen...
...and nothing happens.
You're just staring at the League client.
You can't click on anything, you can't really exit.
Then we started watching the graphs of what's happened with League
and we start seeing games are not starting.
And as that graph starts to grow, we know that we're escalating towards a problem.
So at that point, all the engineers started trying to figure out
what the problem was.
We weren't sure if this was just Philippines or if this was something with Clash.
So we went ahead with Oceania and we saw issues again.
And Japan was coming up quite close, so we decided to go ahead with Japan.
And this was going to be our go, no-go point.
If Japan went well, we would continue as a go
and if Japan had any issues, we would stop the launch of Clash at that point.
The tournament in Japan started...
and everything went perfectly.
So we started to work on the remaining Southeast Asian countries
and in some of those countries, we started to see the same problems.
So we understood generally that the problems were coming about due to load.
One of the things with League of Legends is when we start games
it's kind of coming in in a constant chain.
It does like 10 or 11 games per second.
Like if you imagine, getting on to a subway.
And you imagine a train is like, that's a League of Legends game starts.
And the turnstile sort of checks people's tickets, it verifies who they are.
What Clash was doing was saying, "No, I need you to start a thousand games
and I need you to start them right now."
And so what happens is, there are way too many people trying to get through these platforms
so what the platform does is it just stops letting people come through.
So every country had experienced some issues apart from Japan
and it was at that point, we decided to cancel the whole entire launch.
Up to that point, we were all running on that hope
we'll find that one fix and we can get it out.
But we couldn't fix it.
And that was a true breaking moment for a lot of us.
There is this moment of "Man, I'm really bad at my job."
"What happened? This is on me."
And I think a lot of people on the team sort of felt that way of
"How did we mess this up so bad?"
We not only felt terrible because the project that we worked on failed
but even more so because we let players down, right?
A lot of players had arranged for that weekend to be with their friends and play Clash
and they were disappointed that that couldn't happen.
But we realized, as vocal and critical as our community can be,
we definitely heard a lot of encouraging words
from our players around the world.
They posted through social media about the great time they had in a previous test,
for example.
Like "Hey, this went pretty bad, you guys should fix it because this is how
I want to play it, so I'll be back, let me know when it works."
That was kind of how we knew in spite of all of the trouble that Clash was creating,
it was definitely a product worth pursuing.
After the initial launch, we went back and re-architected a lot of the way
the platform works and we kept doing betas
and we kept having players come back and try things out for us.
And it really became a very collaborative experience to get it right.
I think there was always some form of hope throughout Clash.
We definitely have seen that positive side of our community that really supported
the development team on it and standing by us when sometimes things don't go as right.
And I think, if we can all work together and be passionate
we can accomplish great things.