After season 4, Riot will be rolling out the updated Summoner’s Rift map in Open Beta stages. It will first hit Team Builder and Intro Bot games and then move on to normal, custom and ranked a few weeks later. This process will take weeks with delays in between for regular testing, bug fixes, etc. So get geared up and expect updates on live servers (yes, that means everyone will be able to play on the updated SR) next month.
For almost six months, we’ve had the updated Summoner’s Rift stewing on PBE as we made tweaks and changes based on your feedback. Although we’ll continue to refine and optimize, we’re pretty happy with where we’re at right now, so we’ll soon be moving onto the next phase: open beta! Once the 2014 season is officially wrapped, we’re going use a staggered rollout during preseason, pushing the updated map onto live in stages to help ensure server stability. Here’s the order for our planned rollout:
Stage 1: Team Builder and Intro Bot games
Stage 2: All normal modes, custom games, and all other bot modes
Stage 3: Ranked
We expect this rollout could take several weeks and we may delay stages if we run into bugs or server stability issues. That said, our plan is to push it out as fast as we can while making sure its appearance is toaster-friendly and doesn’t Lee Sin kick our servers into oblivion.
Finally, while this is still technically a beta (we’re planning to continue to update Summoner’s Rift–for example, expect updates in the next couple of patches!), the updated Summoner’s Rift will eventually completely replace the old one, so there will be no separate queues to play on the existing SR. This’ll allow us to focus our resources on improving the updated SR, and avoid splitting the team’s focus by having to make the upcoming preseason changes on both.
From the entire team that worked on this update, we truly wanted to thank you for your feedback! We can’t wait to face you all in-game on Summoner’s Rift
Riot Aeon
