A Modest Proposal To Deal With DDOS Lottery

Humble suggestion to RIOT - make custom games LANable with no call home for authentication but without recording stats. How would it work? My best notion is, in the client - at login, if the authentication server cannot be reached it would log you in in "offline mode". In that mode, you would only be able to play custom games, and you would have to provide the IP of the server. The client would have a button to go to "online mode," which would (when pressed) cause the client to search for the authentication server and get information about availability and load of RIOT game servers. If the login queue was reasonable (say, shorter than 5,000) and the load acceptable, it would ask for the password again and try to log the Summoner in. If not, the client would stay offline.

As far as the server goes, two proposed changes there. The first and most significant is that the server would have to be available for download. I do not know the architecture of RIOT's game servers, but whatever they are would be fine: if RIOT uses a cluster of *nix boxes, for instance, the server would be released only for Linux. The goal would be to keep redevelopment time to a minimum, so no time is wasted porting the server to Windows or whatever. The second proposed change is to develop a second server-status daemon, in the nature of a time daemon or ident daemon, that just provides information. Clients would ping that port, and it would respond with current server load (needn't be exact - could be something like "on a scale of 10, load is currently a 3"), login queue length, etc. This would help automate server status news.

I'm sure this has been suggested and shot down for excellent reasons in the past. But it would immediately deal with the server reliability issue, would reduce the load on RIOT's servers, would provide the potential for a training environment, and would make RIOT's servers much less attractive to any @(*&%$# who is just seeking to disrupt everyone's good time. Given the current availability woes, now may be the time to overcome those excellent objections (whatever they were).