North American and European League of Legends players will be unable to access the game for a few hours tomorrow.
The game’s ranked queues will be disabled at around 3:30pm CT, with all other game modes following at 5pm CT, according to League‘s status page. Games that were ongoing at the time of the shutdown will not be counted. The servers are being taken down in preparation for Patch 8.14, which is expected to go live on Wednesday.
The game usually does not shut down prior to patches. Patch 8.14 is not a regular one, however. While the usual patch cycle lasts two weeks, the most recent one has gone on for three and will feature some large-scale changes.
First of all, the in-game cursor that has been present since League’s inception is being reworked. The new model was first added to the PBE at the end of May, and will finally see the light of the live servers.
In addition, the gold funneling strategy that has dominated professional play is seeing a massive nerf. In short, if a player has purchased a tier-one or tier-two jungle item and has the most gold on their team, they will receive heavily reduced gold from lane minions. While this nerf is likely only a band-aid fix, its effects will echo through the meta.
It is possible the larger patch requires Riot Games to shut down servers in order to implement, but doing so in the middle of the day seems like a poor decision.
The servers are expected to go back up around 8pm CT.
Update July 16 6:20pm CT: League’s NA servers appear to be live once again.
Update July 17 3:20pm CT: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated servers would be shut down on July 16. While servers were temporarily down on that date, it is unknown whether that was due to preparation for Patch 8.14.
