Riot on Tahm Kench’s rework delay and Server Transfers in League of Legends

Through their community blog “Ask Riot”, the League of Legends development team dedicated part of their time to answer some of the most trending questions from the game’s community. More specifically, two points were the ones that attracted all the attention this time, being of big relevance both for the evolution of one of the Rift's best-known champions and for a problem that took root in various regions around the world for half a year.

Tahm Kench’s rework delayed again

As has already been discussed in recent days, the River King will go through a rework within his skillset of which you can know some of his changes in this article, and that has also been visualized within the PBE as part of his new Arcana skin.

(Picture: Riot Games)

Although the rework was planned to be released as part of the Patch 11.10 updates, ahead of the start of the next competitive split, Patrick “Petrie” Noonam, LoL's Product Lead, revealed that it has been delayed again for the summer of 2021.

“A lot of Tahm Kench’s current power is best utilized by highly-coordinated teams, which means he ends up much weaker for the rest of the player base. Our plan for Tahm is to address some long-standing issues around pro binding [by tweaking his abilities].

We’re still committed to the Tahm Kench mini update and are planning to ship it this summer, as we still need to update some of Kench's animations before he’s unbenched.”

League of Legends Server transfer problems

As many know, Account Transfers to other regions in League of Legends were disabled for several months due to many problems found in the backend services in charge of the accounts management, which often ended up affecting some of the accounts as the data didn’t transfer rightfully.

(Picture: Riot Games)

“When you transfer an account from one region to another, all of the data stored across services need to move over. But towards the end of last year, we started seeing more players run into issues where only part of their information would successfully transfer.”, mentioned Jessica “Rapwnzel” Boettiger, Delivery Lead for LoL.

As she says in the blog, the transfers were a little tricky at many points, as if any dependent service fails to transfer successfully, the entire transfer could fail, or in the worst scenario, appear to complete successfully but miss crucial account data during the transfer, ending in the total loss of the Riot account.

Due to this, it was very common for players to do the transfer through Riot Support during the last months, as the engineers behind the online infrastructure, however, at some point they decided to put a pause on transfers to give the underlying service a refresh.

(Picture: Riot Games)

“At the end of the year, we set out to create a more reliable server transfer experience, which meant upgrading the tools we use to monitor and deploy Account Transfers as well as surfacing some of the downstream errors that were causing problems.

During this effort, we discovered some of these improvements could only be made by partnering with other teams at Riot, which took a bit more time - we didn’t want to disrupt their schedule and projects with unexpected work.”, concluded Rapwnzel on this topic.

• Read more: Riot unveils first details around the long-waited Tahm Kench rework

As of now, Account Transfers to all supported Riot regions are available through the in-game, and thanks to these fixes, it’s very plausible this will remain active in the meantime.