League of Legends players were recently plagued by yet another jungle bug, and this latest one was particularly damaging for a few of the game’s trademark champions.
Junglers began noticing issues with their experience gain while performing their routine jungle clears, resulting in fewer levels gained than seemed appropriate. It’s often difficult to verify that sort of anecdotal experience, but as more players fell victim to it, a consensus began to develop.
So what exactly was the issue, and how did developer Riot Games address it?
Riot tries to fix jungle experience bug
To its credit, Riot was quick to attempt a fix to address the jungle experience bug. A micropatch was distributed through the League of Legends client after the bug was identified.
The bug specifically prevented some champions from receiving jungle camp experience if they moved too far away from the camps they cleared. This was particularly damaging to champions like Shaco and Morgana who tend to move away from their camps quickly as they clear them. Or in Shaco’s case, the champion may hardly interact directly with the camp as he lets his trap boxes do the work for him.
While this is usually correct behavior for these champions as it enables them to move to the next camp or ganking lane that much sooner, with this bug in play, it was actually preventing the champions from receiving any camp experience.
The jungle bug wasn’t limited to champions who moved away from camps, however. Master Yi, another popular jungle champion, was also affected. If Master Yi was untargetable when his camps were cleared, he would not receive any experience. Given that Master Yi’s most frequently used ability during jungle clears makes him untargetable, this was a huge problem for Master Yi players.
Has Riot fixed the jungle experience bug?
Riot Games does appear to have fixed the latest jungle experience bug with its micropatch. The patch’s development and distribution was spoken about by Riot Games employee David “Phreak” Turley, a former play-by-play commentator for League of Legends esports who has gone on to work for Riot’s balance team.
Phreak admitted to the issue and gathered community feedback to try to resolve any other issues potentially associated with the problems.
Riot Games is often criticized for the buggy state of League of Legends. For all of the money Riot brings in, the developer still struggles to keep the game in a stable state. Some improvements have been made to the years, particularly to the game client, but issues continue.
Riot asks for understanding and even mercy from its many millions of players, as League of Legends now bears a complicated web of code stemming from its years of constant development and updates. But players tend to have little patience with issues like these make the game almost unplayable for its most dedicated fans.
