Riot Games has made incredible strides in the Esports industry, pushing the boundaries of sports entertainment. When we started investing in LoL Esports a decade ago, no one (despite what they may tell you now…) would have imagined the impact and scale of where we would be today. We’ve come a long way from the humble beginnings of the Worlds Season 1 finals at Dreamhack in Sweden to today’s groundbreaking, Emmy-winning Worlds productions that delight more than 100 million fans. As we prepare for the next decade of League Esports, we want to continue to innovate in ways that put our players first and surprise and delight our fans.
*Opening ceremony during 2019 League of Legends World Championship in Paris*
As a digital sport, the technology we use represents the foundation for the integrity of our sport. Esports infrastructure is complex and spans multiple regions across the globe. Guaranteeing reliability, consistency, security, and performance in every region is a huge undertaking, especially when we also strive for innovation, which is the key to our success.
This is why I am excited that Cisco has partnered with Riot Games as its Official Enterprise Networking Partner for LoL Esports. The piece of this partnership that we’re looking forward to most is that Cisco comes with a standardized solution for every piece and every layer of our infrastructure, globally, which will allow us to improve the competitive experience both for pro players at our global events and fans at home.
I joined Riot in 2014 to work on the precursor to the LEC--EU LCS--back when our studio was still located in Cologne. I then moved to Los Angeles in 2016 to help build out Riot’s Esports regions globally. I’ve planned and executed the technical setup of Esports infrastructure for more than 20 events, ranging from the regional finals in Brisbane to the finals of a Worlds event, working with teams all around the world, from Singapore to Chile. Today, I am the Technical Product Manager for the Esports Technology Group, which owns the technology that competitive League of Legends and our broadcasts run on.
My team has worked on Esports infrastructure—[and Esports events][1]—since the beginning. We were at LA Live, where an internet outage at the venue caused a major disruption of the Season 2 World Championship. The Esports Tech team pulled long hours to come up with a solution that would solve the connectivity issues, and ended up building a completely offline shard within a day. The hardware for the offline shard was game servers cobbled hastily from our Live datacenters, a trend that would continue over the years, where we would repurpose hardware that the Live shards could spare for our Esports events. Cisco changes all of that. While our servers were never worse than Live (after all, we used Live hardware), for the first time in the history of LoL Esports, we will have servers that outperform our Live servers.
[1]: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/engineering-esports-tech-powers-worlds
*Old Datacenter gear from NA Live getting repurposed for Esports*
LoL Esports was born in North America and Europe, but it grew up globally. We built studios from the ground up in Mexico and Turkey, Brazil and China, and more. The most critical aspect of designing those studios was ensuring smooth gameplay and a rock solid network. Latency is such an incredibly important aspect of our game, because quick reaction times and strategy are the key to victory in games like League of Legends, and having the proper hardware to support the game means that pro players can completely focus on winning without having to worry about the tools they use. This is why beginning at the 2020 All-Star Event, the newest Cisco technology will be implemented for all our competitive game servers at our three largest global events – Mid-Season Invitational, World Championships and All-Star, based on Cisco’s C220 M5 series, which will offer up to 200% raw performance improvement over the previous hardware we were running for our game servers. We selected this server model because it provides the best combination of security and performance for our purposes, offering smooth gameplay, and allowing pro players to compete at the best ping rates.
Latency doesn’t just end at the game server, however; it also plays a role connecting to the Cloud, where several more services run for our Esports realms, such as our live data pipeline, which powers the stats you see on lolesports.com. Minimizing latency both on the server and the network have tangible benefits for players and fans, and Cisco comes with solutions for both.
Only a global infrastructure partner can do justice to the global nature of our sport. Previously, we would have to substitute hardware in our regional studios because our preferred equipment wasn’t available for purchase, and importing hardware often is not just extremely costly, but also hard to maintain and service. Using Cisco technology, we will be able to deploy a new collaborative global infrastructure and networking upgrades. Cisco’s global and regional footprint allows Riot the flexibility, accessibility, and security needed to produce world-class esports events in all corners of the globe. One of the pieces of equipment that we’re implementing in our network is Cisco’s Nexus 9000 Series spine switch N9K-C9364C, which offers 12.84 Tbps non-blocking switching capacity. The increased capacity over our old gear enables uncompressed video over IP. This will give fans at home the ability to watch LoL Esports broadcast streams with reduced delay and improved quality.
*Riot Esports RnD video and audio lab - SMPTE ST 2110*
Riot Esports events are complex productions. The planning process for an event such as the World Championship starts years before the actual event happens, scouting locations and venues. The technical capabilities of a venue actually play a huge factor in determining whether a venue is feasible as an event venue. My team designs the entire technical foundation and lays the groundwork for each venue and each event’s connectivity. Having an infrastructure partner like Cisco, who possesses deep experience in providing technology for large scale sporting and entertainment events and venues such as the NFL, NBA, soccer, and even the Olympics, assures that the technology we use is made for this purpose.
Finally, our partnership with Cisco allows us to heavily invest towards the future of esports. As part of a global initiative to standardize and promote competitive integrity around the world, beginning later this year, Riot Games will deploy more than 200 new tournament game servers in regional studios all centrally managed though Cisco’s new Intersight SaaS solution. With Cisco gear, Riot Games will establish a common infrastructure footprint across all of our regional broadcast centers, including virtualization, storage, and computing to deliver the best performance and lowest latency for regional professional gameplay. We will be able to stay at the forefront of new technologies and innovate even further to introduce amazing new experiences to players.
*Hologram tech debuted for 2019 League of Legends World Championship Opening Ceremony*
I am incredibly excited for this partnership with Cisco, as it demonstrates our continuous commitment to improving our sport through innovation. Cisco’s industry-leading technology, global footprint and established expertise will continue to allow us to bring joy to billions of fans around the world!
To learn more about the partnership, please [click here][1].
[1]: https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=2092812
