Riot Decide The Internet Isn’t Good Enough For LoL
Riot, the developers of popular wizard ‘em up League of Legends have announced that the Internet infrastructure in America isn’t good enough for everyone to enjoy LoL properly. To try and fix this issue they are working with ISP’s to try and allow LoL players to peer directly with Riot’s network.
Riot’s Charlie Hauser posted a detailed blog and took questions on the subject in the LoL forums to clear up any questions users may have.
“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.”
One user asked for a basic rundown of how this will improve the experience for end users to which Hauser replied.
“Many players should see improvements in network quality as our new North American network rolls out. These improvements could be less ping time, less network packet loss, and more stable connections (less disconnects).”
There is no word on if Riot will roll out a similar system in Europe, but it seems unlikely due to how Europe’s Internet infrastructure is set up.
