Riot Working On Its Own Network For League of Legends

Jason Winter
By Jason Winter, News Editor Posted:
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What do you do when you're a game company with 70+ million customers and the Internet infrastructure isn't good enough? Answer: You make your own network.

That's what Riot is doing, in the attempt to stabilize ping for all North American League of Legends players, especially those on the east coast who are far from Riot's west coast servers. This forum post lays out the reasons for and barebones details of what Riot is looking to do:

"Why are we doing this? Currently, ISPs focus primarily on moving large volumes of data in seconds or minutes, which is good for buffered applications like YouTube or Netflix but not so good for real-time games, which need to move very small amounts of data in milliseconds. On top of that, your internet connection might bounce all over the country instead of running directly to where it needs to go, which can impact your network quality and ping whether the game server is across the country or right down the street.

"This is why we’re in the process of creating our own direct network for League traffic and working with ISPs across the US and Canada to connect players to this network."

It's one hell of an ambitious -- and probably expensive -- project, and you have to give props to Riot for such an ambitious undertaking. Here's hoping it leads to a better experience for everyone.

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In this article: League of Legends, Riot Games.

About the Author

Jason Winter
Jason Winter, News Editor
Jason Winter is a veteran gaming journalist, he brings a wide range of experience to MMOBomb, including two years with Beckett Media where he served as the editor of the leading gaming magazine Massive Online Gamer. He has also written professionally for several gaming websites.

Discussion (9)

Kiri 8 years ago
funny that they're complaining about ms but haven't played it in 300 ms, it's quite playable with 180 ms

Jellopy 8 years ago
This would be incredibly nice for people in rural areas with limited internet options like yours truly. And yeah have to agree that is ambitious as hell and takes a lot of tenacity and confidence to hammer this concept out there. If they pull it off that would certainly net them points in my book. League isn't my favorite moba but this does suggest a lot of dedication to their player base.

Sir Jaxxy 8 years ago
Not sure why they don't just join up with and/or white label WTFast. Seeing that WTFast already has the infrastructure in place this would be a much faster and cheaper solution.

View 1 reply
Shinjei 8 years ago
I have a constant 110 ping on east coast on NA servers and don't lag unless something is up with the servers. It would be nice though if they did this and see 42 ping again (my usual with NA game servers.) or even lower.

Roaming Laughter 8 years ago
HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-AHA FIX EUW?

View 2 replies
RonTheBig 8 years ago
I never did have a problem with my network in games or lags from the game itself O.o


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