'League of Legends' suffers attacks, Riot Games pursuing legal action

League of Legends developer Riot Games is pursuing legal action against "a handful of players" who hit the game with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks last week, a problem that appears to be an ongoing issue.

In a forum post dated September 20th, a Riot Games producer explained that the problems players were having — in-progress games were ending prematurely — were related to DDoS attacks and not hacking. The studio updated the game to try and prevent the attacks from killing games. While "players in a targeted game will still experience lag and possibly be disconnected," said the producer, "the client should now be able to reconnect to the game automatically and resume where it left off."

According to the producer, Riot also addressed the attackers themselves. "We have taken steps to identify these attackers and remove them from our service permanently. Additionally we are pursuing legal avenues and working with the proper authorities," the developer wrote. "When someone’s intentionally ruining the experience of other players, we take it very seriously."

Some issues persist — in multiple threads on the League of Legends forums, including one with 10 pages of responses asking for help, users continue to complain about lag, as well as high or rapidly fluctuating pings.

We've reached out to Riot Games for more details, and will update this post with any information we receive.