Greetings Summoners,
I would like to introduce myself and talk about the stability problems we have been having in Europe. My name is Paul Breslin and my role at Riot is to head up Europe. Our top priority is delivering the stable platform you deserve. The recent problems on EUW stem from a storm of capacity, Internet connectivity and patch updates issues. As a player, I know this is not good enough and I would like to talk about what we are doing to level up our services dramatically for Europe.
First, I’d like to tackle a claim that really hurts to read – the idea that Riot doesn't care about EUW players. I can personally promise to you that this isn’t the case. Improving service here is a top priority across Riot and I promise you no one is blind to the pain you’ve been experiencing. It’s an historic problem for European players, I get that – but it’s one we’re truly dedicated to solving.
New EU Server Centre – We have been building a brand new facility in Amsterdam to house the EU servers. We’re building it with the latest designs in infrastructure, all new hardware and bigger/more servers than the current facility has. It will be the newest datacentre for any Riot region, and will be the latest in terms of overall system architecture. This is a massive undertaking that’s already been in the works for several months, and it’s not something that can happen overnight. I hope we can share some more behind-the-scenes details from the new data centre once it’s ready to power on.
Dedicated EUW strike team – On top of the team working on the long-term solution of the new data centre, we also have a dedicated strike team of Rioters from many different disciplines, who are responsible for the stability of EUW. The team is headed by Riot TMX from Europe. To give example of what the strike team do, over the past couple of weeks they have upgraded load balancing hardware, added chat servers, and diversified our internet connectivity by adding more circuits to our data centres. As a result, we’re seeing less impacted playtime on EUW over the last week and that trend is continuing to improve.
Communication – You’re all absolutely right that a big weakness here (and one of the core reasons European players rightly feel neglected) is that our communication around service issues hasn’t been timely or sufficient in the past. We’ve taken great care to solve this, and I hope you’ve noticed an improvement in the visibility, frequency, and quality of our communications during recent service interruptions on the forums. Feedback is greatly appreciated here.
Riot Direct – We know that the internet routing from you to our servers isn’t always ideal. In the past we’ve worked with partners and our datacentres to help direct traffic from you to our servers, but there are constraints that we weren’t willing to accept. With that in mind, we will be taking over the management of network traffic from players to our servers. We’ll be able to change how player traffic hits our servers, and can react quickly to changes/service disruptions and can constantly fine tune traffic flow to best suit players.
Game Metrics – We are building performance monitoring tools into the game client and server that will allow us to track framerate, network performance, and a host of other performance metrics. This new layer of monitoring will alert us to make pre-emptive adjustments to network and game settings to prevent or limit any impact on players.
I hope this gives you better visibility on the issues and reassures you that our top priority is to deliver the game experience we know you deserve. As the above initiatives come online we’ll go more in depth about them ahead of time to make sure everyone is aware of the changes.
