Riot Games is working with ISPs to fight your League of Legends lag problems (update)

League of Legends developer Riot Games is working with North American Internet service providers to build its own dedicated network that will improve connection speed and stability for players in the U.S. and Canada, the company confirmed in a forum post.

Many players — particularly those on the East Coast of the U.S. — have noted long-standing issues with lag in League of Legends. This server promises to help solve this issue in the game, writes Riot's brand strategist Charlie Hauser, noting that current ISPs aren't designed for real-time games in mind.

"Currently, ISPs focus primarily on moving large volumes of data in seconds or minutes, which is good for buffered applications like YouTube or Netflix but not so good for real-time games, which need to move very small amounts of data in milliseconds," Hauser writes. "On top of that, your internet connection might bounce all over the country instead of running directly to where it needs to go, which can impact your network quality and ping whether the game server is across the country or right down the street."

"This network should bring a marginal improvement for everyone — coast to coast," Hauser continues. "West coasters are impacted by this as well — we've seen traffic in San Francisco get bounced across the country before finally getting to the server."

The hardware for the new network should be running by the end of March, says Hauser; however, the contractual negotiations with ISPs may take longer.

Update: Riot confirmed to Polygon it has plans to offer the same dedicated server capabilities in Europe. No firm dates have been released as of yet.