Fixing the Internet for Real-Time Applications (Games)

League of Legends (LoL) is not a game of seconds, but of milliseconds. In day-to-day life, two seconds fly by unnoticed but in-game a two-second stun can feel like an eternity. In any single match of LoL, thousands of decisions made in milliseconds dictate which team scores bragging rights and which settles for “honorable opponent” points. The Internet, however, was not constructed for applications that run like this, essentially in real time.

This talk will discuss the steps Riot Games has taken, and will continue to take, to fix this fundamental problem with commodity Internet, with a specific focus on the work done to improve the experience of our European players.

Adam Comerford is currently a Senior Systems Engineer at Riot Games in Dublin and obsessed with improving the League of Legends experience for players in Europe (and beyond). He has a broad technical background spanning 15+ years and multiple disciplines including networking, distributed systems, NoSQL databases and more.