League of Legends Building Dedicated Network

If you haven’t taken the MOBA gaming scene seriously yet, you might want to pay attention to this: Riot Games is building a direct network for League of Legends traffic in North America.

A recent update from the Riot Team included revised roadmap expectations and a Q&A with staff. So why is Riot taking the leap into building its own traffic lane?

“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.”

Players may expect to see less ping time, packet loss, and disconnects as the network rolls out and more ISPs in the US and Canada get connected. The full network should be finished by the end of March 2015, though some negotiations may still be in place with ISPs by the time it is complete.