Hi, we will have shards, but they won’t be the same as League uses. Because latency is less important to us we can have wider shards that keep more players together.
As for which countries and regions go to which shard, I can’t speak to that yet, because it could change some. I also don’t know any details yet about transferring. As soon as I know that, I’ll report back to reddit and discord - I know transfers are a hot topic.
As /u/ivey says we have have shards. In the preview event we have three, "Asia", "Americas", and "Europe". You can see which one you're on by checking the settings window in game. We're still hammering out details, global launches have some complex logisitics. One of the most complicated things we have to deal with is regional/national laws around data privacy and payments processing. Many countries have very different rules and Riot has negotiate with many. Sometimes a countries laws force us to do things different and sometimes the rules of processing payments and handling money makes us make other choices.
Another logistical consideration is peak play times and maintenance. Different players around the world have different play times and we really don't like take shards offline during peak play times in various regions.
So generally the "tech" is the least of the concerns, but we do factor in things like available server capacity and data-center concerns for target players in game and concurrent user loads as well (at global scale you'd be surprised how much server capacity is needed, especially when you start factoring in mobile players).
At the end of the day the decisions we make are about balancing the best player experience we can provide with all of the above stuff. We definitely understand the player desire to play with friends and that today's relationships between players span the globe.
Hi, we will have shards, but they won’t be the same as League uses. Because latency is less important to us we can have wider shards that keep more players together.
As for which countries and regions go to which shard, I can’t speak to that yet, because it could change some. I also don’t know any details yet about transferring. As soon as I know that, I’ll report back to reddit and discord - I know transfers are a hot topic.
maxfields2000
As /u/ivey says we have have shards. In the preview event we have three, "Asia", "Americas", and "Europe". You can see which one you're on by checking the settings window in game. We're still hammering out details, global launches have some complex logisitics. One of the most complicated things we have to deal with is regional/national laws around data privacy and payments processing. Many countries have very different rules and Riot has negotiate with many. Sometimes a countries laws force us to do things different and sometimes the rules of processing payments and handling money makes us make other choices.
Another logistical consideration is peak play times and maintenance. Different players around the world have different play times and we really don't like take shards offline during peak play times in various regions.
So generally the "tech" is the least of the concerns, but we do factor in things like available server capacity and data-center concerns for target players in game and concurrent user loads as well (at global scale you'd be surprised how much server capacity is needed, especially when you start factoring in mobile players).
At the end of the day the decisions we make are about balancing the best player experience we can provide with all of the above stuff. We definitely understand the player desire to play with friends and that today's relationships between players span the globe.
ivey
Hi, we will have shards, but they won’t be the same as League uses. Because latency is less important to us we can have wider shards that keep more players together.
As for which countries and regions go to which shard, I can’t speak to that yet, because it could change some. I also don’t know any details yet about transferring. As soon as I know that, I’ll report back to reddit and discord - I know transfers are a hot topic.