Late last week, Riot revealed plans to relocate the North American servers for its popular online multiplayer game League of Legends from Portland to Chicago. The plan is to centralize the location of the servers, and thereby reduce lag for the greatest number of players possible. What could be the problem, you ask?
The only issue with the promising lag fix, the issue that’s begun to percolate on the League of Legends internet, involves the game’s burgeoning professional scene. Right now, the majority of professional League of Legends teams are based out of somewhere or another in the West Coast.
There’s a good reason for this de facto migration of League of Legends eSports: being closer to the game’s servers means that you’ll suffer the least amount of lag — or have the small pings, in League-speak. And since high-stakes League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) games that are put on by Riot every year are decided by games played over local area networks (LAN), that means pros will now have to train on a quite possibly laggier version of League than the one they actually play on.
Many American League pros have been sounding off on Twitter over the past few days to express their concerns with Riot’s upcoming move:
Don’t have to worry about ping increase if I just quit
yea I’m 100% not playing soloq after they change servers
— David (@YusuiLoL) August 11, 2015
ppl are getting mad at west coasters for complaining but it actually screws over lcs/challenger players? lol i guess they wouldnt understand
— Yuri (@TSMKEITHMCBRIEF) August 11, 2015
Completely random question: what is the cost of living in chicago?
— Will Hartman (@meteoslol) August 11, 2015
As that last tweet from the League player Meteos suggests, many pro players now feel a pressure to consider relocating so they can play and practice the game under the best possible conditions, at least server-wise.
Even though pro League players are the League players most able to move across the country for the game, remember that eSports is still a relatively nascent industry. Most of these players’ careers as actual LCS players last two, maybe three years. Since many pros are also very young, a move could also mean they’d have to uproot their family as well.
Pro player I Will Dominate had the most measured take on the situation that I’ve seen so far, saying that the real problem isn’t with one group of players getting better or worse lag compared to another group. Really, the problem is the “inconsistency” of League’s servers across geographic distance:
As a player that went pro with 100 ping from Miami I guess i’ll give some insight into why LCS players are upset about the relocation and increase in ping for West Coast Players. As a solo queue player ping doesnt really matter that much. Many solo queue players have went pro with 80-200 ping because once you get used to your ping it is stable and you can start playing around your ping. You can select a champ pool that is easy to play with 80-100 ping as well as learn when you generally have to use your abilities to compensate for the ping itself. The reason that this is such a big deal for professional players is because going from 0 ping at the studio to 10 ping on tournament realm to 90 ping in solo queue makes it extremely hard to adapt to your ping and will show a definite decrease in your performance. The most important thing that you have to remember in regards to latency is that it is stable. You would much rather have 80 ping flat then jump from 45-65 at random. With the live server ping increase LCS players will be forced to adapt to multiple latency numbers at different points throughout the day and throughout the week making it difficult to play at an optimal level. A higher stable ping is not the issue. The issue is the inconsistency of ping across all different playing realms.
IWD’s take is fair and reasonable, but it’s worth noting that many video games — let alone ones as popular as League of Legends — suffer minor connectivity issues when trying to support servers that cover a chunk of earth as large as the United States. Until Riot’s pie-in-the-sky vision for a lag-killing network comes to fruition, tradeoffs like the one Riot just made are going to keep happening.
Comments
8 responses to “League Of Legends Pros Aren’t Happy About Riot’s Latest Lag Fix”
Couldn’t they just add a new East Coast server instead of relocating the existing one?
They could, Valve have multiple server locations in the US for Dota.
Of course though, League never copies Dota.
@cffndncr Not unless they want to spend a butt load of money. They manage their own data centre.
As an Australian, if my ping is under 200 I’m damned thankful.
As an Australian we’ve had oceanic league servers for quite some time now, so…
Yeah, when people say “Oceanic servers” we expect them to be damned Australian ones, not based in singapore and with ~150 ping (looking at you wargaming.net).
I know this is old, but what the hell are you talking about? There have been Oceanic (AUSTRALIAN) LoL servers since 2013. I get less than 20 ping.
For the purpose of competitive scrims, they could allow for player hosted games. solo queue would still be hindered (a word that is only partially accurate) by a change in latency.
Chicago is less than the width of Australia away from where the servers currently are, anyone from Perth care to weigh in on how bad latency is in League of Legends? The internet infrastructure through the middle of the US is likely of a higher quality due to their actually being civilization in the middle of the country. Also you are looking at an increase in maybe 40-50ms, it is a difference sure, and one you will have to make minor adaptations to but be honest, it isn’t a game changer. Complaints about unplayable latency should kick in around a stable 200ms.
I don’t play league, but from my experiments ping from Perth to Sydney is around 50ms greater than a Perth to Perth ping.
Realistically tho that kind of difference seems rather unlikely to be awfully noticeable in terms of actual human reaction time. Tho I’m happy to have someone educate me on that.