Riot Games’ long awaited autobattler game mode, Teamfight Tactics, released today to League of Legends live servers. The mode has gotten so popular, though, that the company has enabled queue time throttling on the NA servers in order to avoid a crash.
This was an obvious problem that Riot was going to have. Thousands of players in North America rushed to update their game to hop into a TFT match this morning. And back when the game mode was on the League PBE, queue times to log into the client were upwards of 24 hours as well.
“We’re having a hard time keeping up with all the TFT games right now,” said Ed “SapMagic” Altorfer, Riot’s senior design manager of gameplay. “Expect a 5+ minute delay, which helps keep our servers from crashing.”
Although SapMagic said that the queue times will be five minutes or more, many players are reporting that they have had to wait up to 15 minutes for a game. Granted, this is a completely different game created by Riot and the excitement for TFT is understandable. This mode has also attracted multiple other players who were previous players of other popular autobattlers, like Dota 2 Autochess and Dota Underlords.
One way to ensure you have shorter queue times is to queue up with seven other friends or join League of Legends-based Discord servers, in order to create full TFT lobbies. Hopefully, this extended wait time will be removed as soon as Riot figures out what to do with the increased load on its servers.
