Communication between players is one of the most important pieces of a social game. Yet, the nuanced relationship between a fully-featured chat service and the rest of a game are often overlooked.

In this lecture you'll hear the story of how the chat in League of Legends' PvP.Net was launched and how it evolved over time. We had three expectations for our chat service: that it would be scaleable, not impact stability, and the UI would meet the player's needs.

We initially failed on all three fronts. But that's not the end of the story.

We were able to turn around to achieve and surpass all three of our initial expectations. This talk will cover the surprising emergent issues and mistakes that caused these problems, and will detail the specific solutions that were implemented in order to solve them during a live product.