We use your point of origin country to determine some things, especially if you're a brand new account. It would always be best to wait for us to resolve a problem like this as a result. Less of a concern if you already have logged in and played before but even so, a VPN messes up our understanding of where you're coming from and can prevent us from giving you an optimal network experience.

I know you'd probably want more details than that, but reddit is the right place to go into how it all works.

Without getting too specific, there was absolutely a network routing problem getting to our servers from Poland (and several other eastern European countries). We had to work the issue and make sure internet traffic could get to our services where they are hosted.

There was no active block on our part to deny service, there was a peering issue that thankfully we have the ability to work with and solve. I don't work on the network teams that sorted it all out for us. Needless to say, Riot has a very large global internet presence and ability to partner and work through these issues.

A VPN that created an origin from a IP range not affected by this problem would be able to route correctly and that is why a VPN would work around this problem. Please note, we don't recommend using one to solve these problems, we'd prefer the proper fix be in place but I completely understand the frustration of wanting to be able to play.

The global internet is a very complex place, a surprising amount of how your network traffic flows around the world depends on your source IP. All it takes it one router, with some ISP or network provider, that your countries traffic usually flows through, to have a problem and suddenly you can't access things.

A VPN provider you can reach, then uses a different origin IP for your traffic, will then route differently and appear to work like magic. It's good for masking your point of Origin (and thus fooling any system using it to block your country) AND working around major network routing issues based on your point of origin.

I'm not at liberty to discuss our load or total capabilities but I can say if we had to cap access to the shard for load related reasons (which we haven't had to yet) we would not do it by blocking specific countries. We have login queue, throttles and shard caps in place and they are basically first come/first serve style implementations for the regions they support.

(edit: grammar, typing too fast, derp)

Sadface :( We're not intentionally blocking Poland but there are issues we're working through. This stuff frustrates us too! My team is in charge of watching things like throttles and server capacity and we haven't had to pull large plugs like this yet.

We definitely want you and your friends in game!