It wouldn't cost thousands of dollars to put servers on the east coast, it would cost millions. They would have to either lease space from a very large data center or build their own, and buy thousands of servers, plus networking equipment. They would need to make sure all the network architecture is stable, and setup properly. They would have to staff it, and maintain it. This all takes a lot of time, planning, testing, and money. However, they have also mentioned in posts that they are working on it. I remember they said they don't want to have to split North American players into two regions, so they are working on fixing some technical limitations that would stop them from having to do that.
Here is Riot's most recent post that addresses East Coast Servers:
Quote from **Cedriel **(Country Manager): [see post]
We try to be transparent on what we do and why we do it: that's why we're doing things like patch previews, post content ahead of time for feedback on PBE, write dev blogs and interact directly with players in the forums, twitter, reddit and such. Unfortunately, there are things about which we can't say much until we have something to deliver.
For instance, take a project that is still in an early stage and is undergoing a lot of testing and revision. Anything we show you is going to create excitement and set expectations, but what we actually launch might end up being very different, to the disappointment of a great many people who were anticipating something else. Sometimes, we find along the way that what seemed like a great idea turns out to just not to be fun in practice, and simply never release it because it would've been a pretty bad player experience. We messed up bad with Magma Chamber on this one, for instance.
Another example would be projects that are large in scope and technically complex. Sometimes these things change mid-development, or we find out that some problems were more complicated than we anticipated. Particularly when you're doing new things, deadlines can slip. If we promise stuff and fail to deliver, you have a right to be pissed at us. We'd rather under-promise and over-deliver!
Finally, there are projects that we simply have to be vague about for security reasons. Security often plays out like a cat-and-mouse game in which hostile parties come up with creative new vectors for attack and we come up with counter-measures. Spelling out in detail what those counter-measures will be ahead of time amounts to giving these people advance notice, and making them less effective. For instance, we're working on solutions to reduce or eliminate the pain that players feel from DDOS and drophack attacks, but we can't really talk about what or how.
We recognize that East Coast players are not getting the same quality of service that West Coast players do—and we're committed to doing something about that. Wiser heads than mine are working on this. Unfortunately, if their work hits any of those points—and almost any solution will—there's just not much we can say until it's ready or near-ready. It's frustrating to you because it feels like we're not listening, and it's frustrating for us because there's nothing that we want more than to show all the cool stuff we're doing to make League of Legends better—but there are good reasons for it.
In the meantime, all we can do is apologize for not being good enough, thanking you for your patience, and telling you that we're working on it.
