The past several days have seen a host of complaints by Oceanic players around the region, with many suffering from variable latency — you’ll know it as “ping” — in their League of Legends matches.
Normally, latency for Sydney players is the ‘perfect’ 8ms. Riot’s client doesn’t show a lower number than this. Melbourne players see a value of around 18-20ms, while Brisbane players clock in at around 24ms in most matches.
Oceanic players haven’t always had it this good either. In years past, when North American servers were the only option, latency was locked to around 140-180ms. Veteran League players from that time will attest to how poor an experience it really was.
If you didn’t play back in those days, and weren’t among the lucky few to be constrained by Australian internet as a housemate explores the wonders of streaming video, you could normally have a pretty great ping in League of Legends.
That is, until recently.
Players attempting to play solo queue in Australia on a wide variety of ISP’s have seen pings ranging from 80ms all the way up to a whopping 380ms, rather degrading the ‘good micro’ OCE players are well known for.
There has been no information from official Riot support channels, with nothing coming forth from their Service Status page or official Twitter feed.
Players expressed their discontent on social media. Specific comments were made about the fact ranked queues — both solo and flex — were still enabled, despite a past history of them being disabled amidst infrastructure issues to preserve competitive integrity.
Day 2 of OCE League servers with ridiculously high ping, and everything else is fine.@RiotSupport pls?
Like what in the fresh hell is this? pic.twitter.com/VVlDEWMxWS
— Mordred (@MordredOCE) April 18, 2020
Consultation with the more network routing savvy among our readers had us gather the opinion the routing to Riot Oceania’s datacenter was being interrupted, or poorly done in some manner. Some reports directed to Snowball even suggested “tromboning,” or traffic destined for Sydney, going to Los Angeles and returning to Australia, instead of a much saner direct route.
Player suspicions were confirmed when a Rioter posted on an Australian Network Operators Group mailing list revealing Riot Oceania’s servers had been migrated to a new facility. This migration seems to align with the period of high latency in League queues.
The same email from a Rioter — seen by Snowball sources — also revealed that due to “time constraints” new IP addresses were used on key peering exchanges in Sydney used by many ISP’s to provide a direct and optimized path for their customers to Riot’s servers.
According to our expert sources in Australia, moving an entire server fleet to another facility without downtime, is an impressive feat and the high latency experienced by the players is on the low end of potential impacts to your solo queue games.
Riot Games Oceania did not respond with a comment before time of publication.
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