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Thoughts on Servers?

King Astroslikk·8/17/2014, 6:22:38 PM·1 votes·939 views

I want to start this off by saying that this question is directed more to Riot and their tech/server status department.

Now then, I would like to have two questions answered: ** 1.** Why is there no east coast US server? It seems like we should have one if Latin America has both a North and South server. It would be nice if my game did not play with 100~ ping every day. My best ping ever on the east coast was around 80, which is still double that of most people on the west coast of the US. Is it because you guys are underfunded due to other sections of the company getting larger percentages than they need or is it because there is no one willing to set up a new server in the area? Or are you guys actively seeking out a place to host it? I'm just curious. 2. Why does it cost nearly $20 to transfer servers? I feel like it should be free or at least be also chargeable with IP, especially from NA to LAN since LAN is hosted out of like Tampa, FL. I can't imagine that it is super hard to just send files from one server to another. I get it to an extent, you only want people to play on their nearest servers so that people from the Euro West server don't play (and subsequently lag out on/ruin games) on the LAS server, but then shouldn't your client force us onto whatever server IS closer to us? Why allow us to choose servers at all? Maybe you guys could implement something like that where the game checks your location and determines the closest server and you play on that server. I'm not really good with server tech, but I know a little since I helped a friend set up a couple small servers for things and I'm curious as to the goings on in the programming department(s?) since I'm getting a CS degree an as an east coast US player.

Anyways, thanks for reading, please let me know what you think!

tl;dr- Why is there no east coast server? Why does it cost nearly $20 to transfer servers(no IP options?)? Are you guys actively looking for a place to host an EC NA server?

3 Comments

Draven Always8/17/2014, 6:25:01 PM1 votes

I hate that there is no east cost server, and that east coast has the most lag out of any other areas in North America. Riot should spend some of their money that we threw at them to improve east coast servers. Many people play from the east coast. I hate this lag.

OTH Radar8/17/2014, 10:06:53 PM1 votes

Building, maintaining, and transitioning to a second server farm on the East Coast would be an absolutely HUGE investment for riot. Servers are expensive to maintain. It's not as simple as just finding a space and setting up a few servers in a room and letting them go. You need a network infrastructure team. You need a management team. You need a room with the proper cooling, security protocol, redundancy and backup servers, disaster recovery plans. You need to buy the servers, the racks to hold the servers, the power boxes to keep them running, the cabling to patch it all together, and you need to ensure that you can keep that all reliable.

Unfortunately, all that expense is not going to turn into very much profitability for Riot. Sure, you might halve your ping, but even someone out west like me still pings reliably at 57 plus. Building an entire new center and all of this infrastructure probably isn't worth 40 ms of lag reduction for what I would say is only 1/4 of their players.

As far as why server transfers cost so much, my best guess would be that it's a deterrent to constant server switching which would be costly on their part.