League of Legends Is Getting Its Own Network (NA)

League of Legends players who live far away from regional servers have had increasing lag over the years which hadn’t been addressed in what seemed like a long time. Riot Games is planning on building League of Legends its own network in North America that will hopefully allow all players to have an equally lag-free LoL experience.

Most of the issues regarding lag disparities in North America stem from the fact that players on the East Coast had significantly more ping (latency between player’s computer and game server) than those on the West Coast. Since the League of Legends servers are in California, this makes sense but doesn’t make it any less frustrating for players in a game that can depend so much on mechanical skills and quick movements. Players in Florida could even experience more favorable ping when creating accounts on Riot’s Latin America North (LAN) servers.

Riot hopes that by creating a more stable infrastructure, they can create a more streamlined and level experience for players across the board. Here’s an explanation straight from Riot Ahab’s post on how this is all going to happen:

Today, I want to introduce Riot WizardOTL (formerly Riot WizardoftheLake), who has been busy leading the charge on Phase 2 of the Roadmap: building a dedicated network for League of Legends traffic.

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.

Riot hopes to have the network up and running sometime in March. If you have lingering questions about the finer details of the network, head over to the Q&A that was held in the comments of Riot Ahab’s post.