Teamfight Tactics server troubles appear to be fixed

The good news for Riot's Auto Chess-alike Teamfight Tactics is that it's "super fun" and people really seem to enjoy playing it. The bad news is that its popularity is most obviously reflected right now in the way that servers are struggling to keep up with demand. Queue times are huge, and a load-induced problem that cropped up in the EU West region forced a delay in rolling the game out to other regions.

In an update posted today, Riot said that two major issues—unusually long off-peak queue times in North America, and unusually long overall queue times and players being unable to access other game modes in EU West—have (hopefully) been dealt with. Fixes for both have been rolled out, and North America now looks "healthy" while EUW is "relatively stable," and in both cases Riot will continue to monitor the situation in case something else explodes.

With the EU West fix in place, Riot said it now plans to launch Teamfight Tactics in the remaining regions "within the next few hours," which means that it should be live everywhere tonight. If other issues come up during those rollouts, however, Riot said it will "take actions to preserve server stability, up to and including temporarily disabling TFT."

"We’re cautiously optimistic that queue times and demand will stabilize, and we’ll continue to keep you updated through the client, boards, and on social media," Riot wrote. "These issues have been painful to say the least, but on behalf of the team, thank you so much for your excitement—and more importantly, your patience—as we find and fix them."

Teamfight Tactics looks set to become a major success, but it's not the only game in the game: We ran down the three big players in the emerging "autobattler" genre—Teamfight Tactics, Dota Underlords, and Auto Chess—earlier this week.

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Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.