Riot Games accidentally deleted patch 13.1B

Riot Games just accidentally reverted all of Patch 13.1B for League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics, here’s what happened.

On February 6, 2023, League of Legends players began to notice some odd goings-on in their games. Patch 13.1B had been launched as a partial replacement for the missing patch 13.2, which was delayed due to hackers stealing Riot Games’ source code. The B-patch was meant to partially launch some of the larger changes meant for 13.2 so that the metagame didn’t get stale. However, partway through February 6, the entirety of 13.1B disappeared from Riot Games’ live servers entirely, rewinding the entire game to the previous patch. Here’s what happened.

Patch 13.1B disappears from live servers

The changes were first noticed by players getting into games on the live League of Legends servers on February 6. All of the balance changes and other tweaks made in the previous patch were gone. It wasn’t a partial reversion to certain systems or targeted tweaks. The entirety of the patch just disappeared from the League of Legends servers. The huge AD carry buffs disappeared, Teamfight Tactics’ unit changes dropped off the face of the earth, and everybody was suddenly stuck playing an old patch. Community content creator and bug-finder supreme Vandiril posted a video to YouTube that highlighted the issue.

The issue was confirmed by Riot Games, saying on Twitter that a bug had caused the patch to roll back on itself, reverting to Patch 13.1 instead. The developer said that it was confident a solution would be found, and service would be restored in a few hours. Two hours after the announcement was posted on Twitter, the patch had been fixed and put back onto the live servers. During the time that the issue was known, all ranked queues were disabled for both LoL and TFT.

What caused the patch’s reversion?

There is no official explanation as of yet for what exactly caused the last-minute patch to be rolled back. As a result, there’s no way of saying exactly what technical glitch caused an entire patch to disappear into thin air. It was well documented by Riot Games employees that getting 13.1B live for both League of Legends and TFT presented enormous hurdles. The theft of Riot Games’ source code through a social engineering attack caused significant changes to the patch cadence and made pushing new content more difficult.

The makeshift nature of Riot Games’ efforts to publish a balance update at the end of January probably led to corners being cut or unusual methods of implementing new content. Hopefully, Riot Games has figured out how to undo these issues so that Patch 13.3 won’t face the same issues. Patch 13.3 launches two days after the issue debuted on February 8, 2023. There likely won’t be an official reason for exactly why a patch disappeared from live servers, but it seems like Riot Games’ patch schedule is mostly restored. Patch 13.3 will bring with it the Aurelion Sol rework and several other large changes.